IT Outposts

Kubernetes Enterprise Support https://itoutposts.com/kubernetes-enterprise-support-services/

The past few years have been a watershed for containerization technologies, driven by growing interest among businesses and organizations in cloud environments—public and private—to migrate legacy as well as build new applications and services, ComputerWeekly notes. The use of containers can significantly reduce the time spent on creating, modifying or maintaining applications. The most popular containerization technologies include Docker and Kubernetes. The former sparked interest in containers to a certain extent, but over time, most enterprises switched interest to Kubernetes as a more mature technology. It has now become a key tool for working with workloads in the cloud, providing a predictable level of application portability.

Despite the fact that both technologies "play on the same field", there are differences between them. And the most important of them is that, unlike Docker, which is a framework for running containers, Kubernetes is an orchestration system for managing clusters of containers (the collection of which is a distributed application). Kubernetes was developed by Google to create its own cloud services, but after the release of Kubernetes v1.0 in mid-2015, the technology was transferred under the control of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) along with the disclosure of the source code.

As a container orchestration tool, Kubernetes has recently begun to outperform competitors such as Swarm (a tool for creating clusters from Docker containers) or Apache Mesos. Major public cloud service providers have started offering it out of the box: Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on Google Cloud, Azure Container Services (AKS) on Microsoft Azure, and Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) on AWS. In addition, Kubernetes is used as an integration bus with a growing number of on-premises solutions, such as the Red Hat OpenShift software development and publishing platform or the Pivotal Container Service (PKS). Even Docker has added Kubernetes support to its Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) platform.

The support of Kubernetes technology by so many platforms is not accidental - its API provides the necessary level of interoperability for porting applications between different cloud services. With Kubernetes, you can run multiple virtual clusters while using the same servers, making containerized applications easier to port. Canonical, the developer of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution that has switched to enterprise solutions in recent years, has also recognized the power of Kubernetes in the multicloud by integrating the containerization tool with several of its solutions.

So what are the benefits of Kubernetes? Its key benefit is that, as an integrated component, it eliminates the need for the user to interact with containers directly, allowing them to focus on building applications. According to Shuttleworth, there is a layer of developers who believe that this development of Kubernets loses its flexibility and it would be better if the container technology developed according to the Canonical model, that is, openly and without piling up proprietary layers. “We do not accept the position of some of our competitors, who, as we see it, are promoting obsolete, complicated business models for PaaS infrastructure, while developers need sterile Kubernets. That's why we've focused on delivering simple, low-cost infrastructure with third-party solutions,” he said.

The issue of Kubernetes openness is really important, because, as history has shown, the closed nature of the technology very often led to binding (the so-called lock-in) to proprietary solutions, but still one cannot discount the fact that turnkey platforms can save a lot of money. effort and money, offering a ready-made infrastructure for the operation of an application or service, as well as additional services (load balancing, monitoring, etc.). Quocirca's director of customer service, Clive Longbottom, takes a similar view to Shuttleworth's, saying that he welcomes Kubernetes being populated with additional libraries, but the core core must be kept intact.

It should be noted that Kubernetes is far from the only tool required to create a multi-cloud environment. In addition to it, organizations should have cloud management platforms with a strong cross-platform component, but so far this market is in its early stages of development. One way or another, but enterprises need a standard that would allow them to run containers in the multicloud, and so far everything suggests that it is Kubernetes that claims this role, which allows you to run applications from almost anywhere.