When do you need to use Kubernetes?
When implemented well, and matched with requirements, the tool simplifies the container management tasks and has great potential to improve operations and efficiency while reducing costs.
That said, Kubernetes is ideal for high availability applications and businesses with highly distributed workloads and requirements.
When using Kubernetes is justified
The best strategy is to carefully evaluate your requirements, determine if you need Kubernetes or whether there are simpler alternatives. Below are some examples of when you need to use Kubernetes.
For large high-availability services
The tool empowers teams to improve operations by giving them the ability to develop software at the speed of modern businesses. Additionally, it works across multiple clouds and providers while supporting a large number of stateless and stateful workloads. Consequently, this makes it an ideal solution for large, scalable, and high availability workloads.
Running containerized applications at scale
So, if you are building software for a highly distributed and large market such as an e-commerce website with thousands of users, Kubernetes is a great solution. For such, you can use it to perform automated deployments, updates, scheduling, and scaling.
It will also monitor the health of the containers and provide self-healing to fix or replace those that are malfunctioning. Additionally, the monitoring allows the tool to automatically launch containers that meet certain resource requirements.
Streamlining operations on multi-cloud environments
In such situations, Kubernetes helps to automate most of the manual tasks, balance the workloads, and place each on the right cloud. This enables you to manage your apps and services across different cloud environments effectively.
Additionally, the ability to run from anywhere allows you to take advantage of the on-premise, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructures. You can also move your workloads between the different locations or cloud systems.
For microservices based architecture
At times, these microservices are distributed across different cloud environments and providers. This adds some complexities to the development processes as well as managing and troubleshooting of the different components.
Linking the different pieces together, ensuring the availability of adequate resources, and that everything works efficiently requires careful planning and management. In practice, this is a big challenge if done manually. However, Kubernetes can support the microservices software development model in various ways. For example, it dynamically assigns resources and allows multiple processes to share the resources more efficiently.
Reduce the cost of infrastructure and resources
The features will increase resources when there is high traffic and demand for services, and then scale them down during off-peak usage. This allows businesses to save on infrastructure costs by only paying for what they use. However, it requires a pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure plan.
Improve efficiency and quality
Some features enable sharing resources such as storage and others, such as service discovery enables the communication between different containers.
Supporting microservices enables software development companies to organize and optimize their operations, keep their teams small but more specialized. Usually, a team will provide the best when focusing on a single smaller software component or microservice.
To deploy and update applications faster
You can, however, use Kubernetes to automate most of the repetitive manual tasks, hence improve speed. Other than this, it automatically manages the network resources to efficiently handle the increased traffic during the large scale deployments or updates.
Conclusion
Generally, Kubernetes is more effective when several dozen servers are distributed across a large and complex infrastructure. Although it can work with a few servers, you may not get its full benefits. And the effort required may be costly in terms of time, money, and lost productivity.
While deploying the technology can be a challenge for many large and small teams, they can consult third-party providers for assistance. This enables the businesses to overcome most of the Kubernetes configuration and management challenges, hence realize better ROI.
