Hello everyone, and welcome to the Cognixia podcast – your one-stop shop for interesting trivia, news, and discussions about emerging digital technologies.
This week, we are going back to the basics to talk about something very important. If you are a DevOps engineer or aspire to be one, this episode is an absolute must for you to listen to. If you know somebody who is a DevOps Engineer or aspires to be one, we strongly recommend sharing this with them, we promise they will be super thankful to you for it.
In today’s episode, we try to answer a very important question –
Why should every DevOps Engineer learn Kubernetes?
Now, before the era of DevOps dawned on us, developers and system administrators were two very separate roles, each functioning in their respective silos. Developers would write the code to create the applications and system administrators would use this code to run and maintain the applications – the operations end of it. Both roles had their respective unique goals and incentives. But DevOps broke down these silos and made everything a lot more seamless. This, in turn, made things quicker. It also helped make services more stable and reliable. So, we could comfortably say that DevOps is a set of practices and guidelines that help improve software development productivity. It has immensely helped shorten the software development lifecycle while delivering high-quality applications with a steady and consistent delivery of code.
One thing that played a major role in enabling the success of DevOps was containerization. If we had to explain in very simple terms what containerization was, we would say it is the process of placing the code, the environment, as well as its dependencies in an isolated space during the application development process. This, in turn, enhances the speed of deployment, patching, and scaling. Containerization has helped resolve some of the biggest problems that deployment faced and its benefits extend beyond just deployment – from boosting the ability to standardize and automate to enabling people to work across languages and technologies.
Coming to Kubernetes,
what is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open-source system for container orchestration. It is a tool that enables one to manage, scale, and automate the process of software deployment. If we had to describe in very simple terms, how Kubernetes is helpful in DevOps, we would say it helps combine the development and maintenance phases of the software systems which improves agility. To simplify it further, we would say, containerization using Kubernetes is an efficient and effective way to implement DevOps compared to the traditional monolithic approach. Using Kubernetes, one can create and manage containers on cloud-based server systems. Using Kubernetes, DevOps teams can bring down the burden on the infrastructure by letting the containers operate on a different machine or environment without breaking down either machines or environments, keeping everything functioning smoothly.
The aim here is to simplify things for everyone. It assists by doing everything that a good system administrator would do – auto-deployment, auto-failover, auto-scaling, logging, monitoring, as well as alerting. It also goes a step further and does everything that a DevOps engineer would do. Thus, it helps everyone and makes everybody’s work a bit easier. Functions like load balancing and autoscaling form the very core of Kubernetes. This ensures that there is zero downtime during deployment as well as during the rollout of new updates. Additionally, there are numerous add-ons, extensions, and third-party tools in the large Kubernetes ecosystem.
A DevOps engineer would hold redundancy and failover configurations immensely valuable. Goes without saying, both of these points hold a top position in the strengths of the Kubernetes tool. Owing to this, once the application is deployed to Kubernetes, compared to a traditional deployment sans Kubernetes, the former would be a lot more reliable as well as resilient. Over and above this, Kubernetes has impeccable autoscaling features which will automatically increase or decrease the running work nodes, based on the usage capacity, leading to auto-cost savings.
Did we tell you about one of the biggest advantages of Kubernetes for DevOps engineers – Kubernetes is completely cloud and provider agnostic. It does not care what cloud service provider or platform you are using; it will still make a DevOps Engineer’s work so much easier and quicker across all service providers and platforms. Now, that’s a huge plus, isn’t it?
Now, we have mentioned a lot of things, a lot of features and benefits here, so how about we sum it all up once, should help everyone, we think.
So, why should every DevOps Engineer learn, know all about, and work with Kubernetes?
One, using Kubernetes ensures zero downtime deployment, you could roll out updates and also avail automated roll-backs, if required, making it a failsafe tool to use.
Two, Kubernetes offers superb scalability, so as a DevOps Engineer, you can scale up and scale down your applications with so much ease, without a hitch. The horizontal pod autoscaler in Kubernetes even helps automate the entire scaling up and scaling down process, so you can ensure all your resources are optimally utilized, your costs are optimized, and everything runs smoothly without any oversight.
Three, infrastructure abstraction. What we mean by this is that Kubernetes can handle the storage, networking, as well as computational aspects of cloud applications by itself.
Four, Kubernetes delivers Infrastructure and Configuration as Code. All you need to do is link your source repository with the configuration files to Kubernetes, and you are all set! Now if you know the headache that can be otherwise, you know what a gem of a tool Kubernetes is by enabling this.
Five, Kubernetes facilitates cross-functional collaboration. Kubernetes offers role-based access controls, which in turn facilitates collaborations across functions, making them very, very easy while still keeping the resources and the configurations steady. Now, that’s a dream, isn’t it?
Six, Kubernetes is a huge blessing for automation. The tool is loaded with commands that come built-in that facilitate automation and make operations easy for everybody. Considering what an important role automation plays, you can understand what a useful tool Kubernetes turns out to be in the arsenal of a DevOps Engineer.
Last but not the least, Kubernetes offers a brilliant self-healing environment. It can help pick up infrastructure failures it can help move containers between codes when there is a failure. Kubernetes can also help auto-restart, auto-replace, auto-replicate, and auto-scale the system by itself. Now that’s a very smart thing, won’t you say?
So, you can see what a useful tool Kubernetes is and why every DevOps Engineer absolutely must learn & know everything about Kubernetes, right? It helps empower DevOps Engineers with its powerful features. Moreover, Kubernetes has a very large community spread across the globe, which is very useful and supportive. Additionally, Kubernetes is an open-source tool, making it free to use and super flexible as well as helpful.
We could keep singing the praises of Kubernetes and it would be another three to four episodes just talking about this, but we still probably won’t be done. You get the drift, right?
So, maybe we will just suffice to say that every DevOps engineer must absolutely invest time and effort towards learning and mastering Kubernetes, it is important and it is almost essential. If you are someone who would like to learn DevOps or Kubernetes, we totally recommend checking out our live online instructor-led courses for DevOps as well as Docker & Kubernetes. Visit our website, www.cognixia.com to know more about courses and get in touch with us to take the next big leap in your career.
With that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We promise to be back next week with another interesting episode from the world of emerging digital technologies and Industry 4.0.
Until next week then, happy learning!
