At a glance, Kubernetes promises a lot for DevOps engineers. However, Kubernetes may not seem beneficial to management.
Today, we’re going to summarize the key benefits of Kubernetes for management.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an open-source framework that runs distributed systems. As such, Kubernetes is often referred to as a container orchestration platform since containers are commonly used to implement distributed system design patterns. Kubernetes is also commonly used to automate deployments, issue updates, and manage apps as well as deploy cloud-native applications. However, Kubernetes is not necessarily cloud-based.
What are the benefits of Kubernetes?
It’s conducive to implementing DevOps best practices
Although using Kubernetes in itself is a little too broad to be considered a best practice for all web applications, it is safe to say that when used correctly, Kubernetes encourages DevOps teams to implement best practices.
Primarily, Kubernetes makes way for reproducible deployments. Reproducible deployments are crucial when it comes to maintaining uptime. As a container orchestration platform, Kubernetes allows for reproducibility in two ways:
Containers are reproducible and immutable by nature making it straightforward to rebuild an image.
Kubernetes management is declarative, which means that it defines the ultimate (immutable) state of a deployment.
The key point for management: Kubernetes allows for DevOps best practices such as reproducible deployments, which increase iteration, deployment, and recovery speed.
It can do (almost) everything for your app
The Kubernetes learning curve is undeniably steep, but it is arguably, justifiably so. Why? Because Kubernetes can do nearly everything for your web application. Imagine this: instead of running multiple smaller processes or having many different softwares achieve different tasks, you could just have one thing do it all (or at least most of it).
Frankly, the learning curve is not incomparable to learning a new stack or getting a new job. It is unlikely that two companies will use the exact same set of tools to run their Kubernetes clusters. Learning Kubernetes can only make your infrastructure simpler in the end. And once you figure it out, you can unlock some additional benefits to using Kubernetes such as:
Being confident in the solutions that you find because there’s usually only one right way to do things on Kubernetes.
Using pretty much only Kubernetes and nothing else to run your infrastructure.
No longer wasting time looking for alternative solutions.
The key point for management: Kubernetes reduces overhead for your infrastructure.
It creates opportunities for optimization
Time. The world’s largest cloud service providers all have a managed Kubernetes service that provides you with all of the benefits, without wasting time on solving problems that have already been solved. Spend less time doing routine maintenance and instead focus on just using it.
Resources. Auto-scaling with Kubernetes is practically built-in. Only access sources, CPU, and storage when your traffic demands it instead of reserving resources that may not always be used.
Money. Kubernetes and containers allow for more optimized resource usage, which inadvertently lowers your costs. With an effective monitoring system in place, Kubernetes could save you a lot of money!
The key point for management: Kubernetes (positively) addresses all three main factors that contribute to an organization’s bottom line: time, resources, and money.
The many layers of abstraction allow for flexibility
Kubernetes makes it easy to separate your infrastructure from your application. That way, your DevOps team can focus on infrastructure, while your developers focus on code. Your developers should in no way need to know how to interact with where the code is hosted, whether it’s the public cloud, on-prem, or multi-cloud; they only need to know how to interact with Kubernetes!
This abstraction makes it possible to outsource infrastructure work at a lower risk! Outsourcing is a great way for businesses to:
Access a team of DevOps engineers instead of restricting to only one hire.
Pay for projects only when it’s required instead of hiring someone full-time who may not always be needed.
Benefit from the experiences, gotchas, and best practises outsourced DevOps engineers obtain from doing infrastructure work on other businesses.
Focus on their application.
If you’re looking to start adopting Kubernetes, consider checking out our guide on how to adopt Kubernetes without an entire DevOps team. Spoiler: outsourcing is a huge time, money, and resource saver!
The key point for management: Kubernetes lets your developers develop.
Conclusion
Although the learning curve may be steep, once adopted and integrated, Kubernetes brings multiple benefits to both your DevOps team and web application. Key benefits to communicate with a manager when considering the adoption of Kubernetes include:
Kubernetes allows for best practices such as reproducible deployments, which increase iteration, deployment, and recovery speed.
Kubernetes reduces overhead for your infrastructure.
Kubernetes (positively) addresses all three main factors that contribute to an organization’s bottom line: time, resources, and money.
Kubernetes lets your developers develop.
What stage are you at with your Kubernetes adoption? Let us know.