What was open-sourced by Google in 2014, is now the 2nd most loved developer platform according to the recent stack overflow survey. The preference for containers over VMs is fuelling the widescale adoption of Kubernetes. To be more specific the preference is to adopt a microservices architecture in building applications. Containerization makes it convenient to adopt microservices. Now, to handle the scheduling and scaling of these containers, and balance the workloads across servers, is where Kubernetes comes into the picture.
What does Managing Deployments using Kubernetes look like?
When you say you’re running Kubernetes, you’re basically running a Kubernetes cluster.
Dissecting a Kubernetes cluster you’ll find one master node and worker nodes, and each node hosts pods. Thus, if it’s a k8s cluster, it means it has a master node and at least one worker node. The worker node manages pods. The pod is the location where our containers run. A single node can run multiple pods, and a single pod can run multiple containers.
The master node is responsible for defining the k8s cluster state by:
- Managing the Scheduling and Scaling of applications
- Maintaining the state of the cluster
- Bringing in updates
What is Managed Kubernetes? Why do you need help in managing Kubernetes?
The concept of “Managed Kubernetes” develops when we hand over the keys of our Kubernetes cluster to a third party. Depending on how much support we want, they assume partial or complete responsibility in handling the operations, maintenance, and scaling of k8s clusters.
Now the question can be why we need Kubernetes Management.
Challenges while Managing Kubernetes
Some commonly observed challenges while managing deployments using Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is not a single platform
Kubernetes is complex, yes. Hence, it does require multiple components to work. When we are planning to install it or update it, we have to take care of all these parts individually.
Kubernetes doesn’t guarantee automatic resource allocation
Kubernetes can easily run in the production environment with a single master node. Suppose this master node fails, it’ll bring down the entire process the cluster was performing. Thus, high availability is not guaranteed. Automatic distribution of resources across various workloads is also not guaranteed. For that, we need to manually set up resource quotas.
Summing up, Kubernetes does a good job at keeping your workload up and running but that is contingent on factors like:
- how many master nodes are set up and
- how we have planned to structure resource allocation.
Challenges with Kubernetes Monitoring and Performance Optimization.
Kubernetes doesn’t alert before any cluster goes down. It doesn’t report the problems that might be hampering performance. On top of that, it doesn’t do much in terms of cost optimization. You don’t get a clear idea of the usage of servers in clusters – what if the infrastructure is over-provisioned?
All these points make it necessary to integrate with third-party tools.
As complicated as Kubernetes management is, we need specialized K8s experts to work on all these aspects. For bigger enterprises, it’s easier to consider an in-house team for managing kubernetes. However, this situation is very different when startups and small & medium-sized businesses think of running Kubernetes. It’s ideally better for them to switch to Managed Kubernetes.
Why? Let’s look at the below-mentioned reasons.
Reasons to Switch to Managed Kubernetes
- Lower management overhead
- You will need fewer experts
- Better reliability
- Don’t worry about upgrades and patches
- Maintaining cloud momentum
Lower Management Overhead
It’s easier to fall into the trap of handling operations end-to-end. However, that hasn’t been a wise decision in bringing progress. The choice of what tasks needs to be handed off helps prioritize efforts in the right direction.
With Managed Kubernetes you are not worried about running Kubernetes, you are concerned about running your apps. It is better to have all our engineers focussing on bringing core product updates rather than fixing and wading through the complexities of Kubernetes.
Fewer Experts are Enough!
Let’s pick any crafty object around you – say a Dress or showpiece. Do you think the entire thing – right from the processing of raw materials to giving shape and design, everything has been done by one person? No right! There are separate groups that are dedicated to certain levels in the development of these objects.
Likewise, when it comes to Kubernetes management skills, they are costly and hard to gain. Writing YAML configuration files are tough, however, if someone on the team can get it done. We would essentially want them to handle any critical or tricky workload of our application rather than managing workloads on k8s.
Better Reliability
Whether you choose a cloud vendor or an enterprise-grade management platform, both have better chances of making your k8s cluster more efficient than you do. It’s a no-brainer doubt. The huge scale of engineering teams working behind the upkeep of your k8s clusters – either directly or through an enterprise-grade platform – have experienced and solved major issues than you with your single model. They have a lot of learnings gained via running kubernetes at scale, and also having seen diverse deployment scenarios of their customers.
No more worries about upgrades and patches!
Given the nature of these jobs, it’s not something anyone ever fancies. Cloud providers prioritize this and take it off your plate. If we are thinking of Managed Kubernetes Platform, they undergo scheduled updates from time to time. Ensuring the reliability and efficiency of the platform.
Keeping up with Cloud Momentum
With more and more organizations wanting to shift to cloud, it makes it easy to boost the cloud-native strategy with managed kubernetes services.
By adopting more managed services, we are ensuring the implementation of the best practices. Through managed services, we are enabling to rearchitect our infrastructure with a cloud-native context.
With an enterprise management platform, the process gets even simplified to a few clicks – from onboarding to setup.
However, if we consider an enterprise-grade managed Kubernetes platform which can be easily set up on your system makes it a win-win situation. It not only supports your clusters on cloud but also makes it easy if you have them on-prem. When we are talking about a cloud provider/managed kubernetes service provider, things don’t simplify if we want to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. A platform, on the other hand, is independent of all these hurdles and streamlines the workload distribution among multiple cloud providers, or between cloud and on-prem data centers.
Wrapping Up
We do notice that at the end of the day, not everyone is interested in handing over their keys to a managed Kubernetes service provider – when it comes to handling sensitive data.
With all that said, handling k8s on our own is looking less and less convincing. When you’re offered to have reduced infrastructure costs, optimized performance, and enhanced security – it’s hard to ignore the ease of Managed Kubernetes.
Consult our tech experts who have helped some of the largest companies with their container adoption strategies and services to bridge skills gaps and expertise. If you have any queries related to Kubernetes, feel free to contact us!
