Companies that still prefer virtual machine (VM) hosting face significant problems these days, such as:

• high total cost of ownership for infrastructure,
• poor reliability,
• prolonged release cycles,
• insufficient availability,
• lack of efficiency in computing resources,
• weak scalability,
• ineffective process for developing new services.

This is why it may be a good idea to start looking for a more modern alternative to classic infrastructure – one that will take the effectiveness of your work to a higher level.

Solution: Kubernetes as a next-level alternative to VM hosting

Kubernetes (aka K8s), is an open-source platform for containerised applications. It helps you automate deployment, manage apps, and also scale up, whenever needed. K8s was designed in Google in order to manage large production workloads and is strongly supported by the community. It’s compatible with a wide variety of container tools and runs containers in clusters. Leveraged by a growing number of companies across the globe, Kubernetes is growing in popularity and consistently being chosen over many other solutions, both classic and modern – and here’s why.

A short overview of K8s

Kubernetes is more than just a platform with a set of features for solving container orchestration needs. Of course, K8s was created to help us tame the complexity of microservices, as well as deploy and run our apps, but it’s much more than that. This is an entire ecosystem of tools, services, knowledge and support.

Because when you bet on Kubernetes, you also receive a lot of support from the community, both in terms of using and adopting it, not to mention the help that you get whenever any issues emerge. However, there are many other reasons for companies to turn to K8s.

7 top advantages of Kubernetes

K8s stands out from the competition for its:

1. Flexibility and portability – Kubernetes works with a variety of container runtimes, underlying infrastructures and different configurations.
   
   
2. Reliability and availability – K8s helps improve software stability and can be updated with little to no downtime.
   
   
3. Scalability – Kubernetes is virtually future-proof since the platform supports complex, distributed and continuously growing systems.
   
   
4. Cost-effectiveness – thanks to auto-scaling capabilities, K8s is usually cheaper than any other solutions available for medium-large apps and software. The platform can scale up or down depending on the resources required by your app and user traffic, so you pay less for less busy hours.
   
   
5. Efficiency – K8s enables high efficiency both in terms of developer productivity (thanks to upgraded deployment methodologies) and the use of computing resources.
   
   
6. Support for stateful and stateless microservices – originally, Kubernetes offered architectural support for stateless applications only – now, it supports stateful apps as well.
   
   
7. Support for different deployment strategies – these strategies include rolling deployment, canary deployment, flagger deployment, and blue/green deployment, etc.
   
   

All of these features lay a solid foundation for our work, so we can adjust the platform to the projects that we run.

Kubernetes flexible adjustments

If you decide to use Kubernetes as a foundation for your software, you need to define your requirements and organisational structure, in order to find your golden balance between performance and costs.

• Set clear definitions – define your services, roles and team interactions. Decide who is the provider, owner and consumer of the platform; who is responsible for what; and set clear boundaries, so that everyone knows exactly what to do, and how their work is going to affect others.
• Simplify your Kubernetes ecosystem – Dev-ops should reduce Kubernetes complexities to a strict minimum by providing the team with useful abstractions in order to minimise the cognitive load (in other words, the mental effort someone has to put in just to understand and use the platform).
• Manage the platform wisely – make a plan for how and when to create and destroy clusters, isolate different environments or apps, as well as smoothly update to new versions of Kubernetes, etc.
• Take care of security – configure role-based access control and keep GDPR data privacy regulations in mind.
• Think about change management – remember that user needs often change with the technological ecosystem, so dev-ops should consistently make sure that the platform and its new features are understandable and usable for everyone involved, including new team members.

K8s: benefits for your business

If you’re now wondering how using Kubernetes in the cloud can positively affect your business, here is just a short list of benefits:

• Reduced total cost of ownership – you don’t need to invest in any type of physical infrastructure, including the maintenance of certain pieces of equipment. Plus, you pay only for the services and resources that you actually use. And everything’s automated, from deployment down to management and scaling, so you don’t waste your precious time doing these tasks manually.
• Increased uptime of your services – built-in scalability and reliability assurance systems will increase the availability of your software.
• Maximised use of cloud computing resources – by using a Docker deployment platform, you can use a smaller and cheaper worker node VM to deploy your services.
• Smooth and efficient releases – Kubernetes uses its own deployment methodology that enables quick releases. Even complex platforms can be created rapidly by reusing existing objects.
  

If this sounds appealing to you, we can help you get started on your Kubernetes journey. Also, if you still have any concerns, don’t shy away from contacting us, so we can answer any questions that you may have, free of charge!

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