It’s difficult to talk about cloud computing in 2020 without the word ‘containerisation’ creeping into the fore. It’s become somewhat of a buzzword, and with good reason. It’s currently the primary vehicle for companies that want to modernise their legacy systems and transform them into scalable, cloud-native applications that can be more or less future-proofed.
Containers are aptly named. Physical cargo containers completely revolutionised shipping in the 1950s, making the transporting of goods faster, safer and more reliable. Similarly, application containers are themselves a form of ‘digital packaging’, creating self-sufficient virtual runtime environments for deploying or running applications with very specific needs. Much like physical containers completely changed the shipping game, application containers are setting a new precedent for the development of cloud-native applications. But what do containers do?
Container technology is designed to accommodate microservice-based architectures, a way of completely redefining large-scale sweeping development projects to be more manageable and modular, thus making them easier to develop and deploy. Container technology also makes it easier to run legacy applications in environments and conditions that would otherwise be incompatible. These are the two primary advantages of containerisation - deployment and compatibility - and explains why the technology has become such a boon to cloud providers, developers and service providers. In many ways, containerisation is the natural evolution of virtualisation. Virtualisation allows for the distribution of multiple operators systems (OS) on an individual server, but containerisation is far more granular in its approach. Using containers, an organisation can effectively eliminate the dead weight and break down the OS into smaller usable parts, leading to even greater efficiency. What’s more, containers enable applications to be packaged and deployed in their own portable, self-sufficient software environment.
Moving from virtualisation to containerisation has several benefits for organisations. For one, it can massively reduce the cost of infrastructure with many containers running on a single virtual machine (VM). Containerisation also offers better security due to applications being fully isolated in their own runtime environment. There’s also the added benefit that containers can be deployed literally anywhere, including cloud, on-premise locations and hybrid environments.
But how does all of this happen? Containerisation is so desirable because of the way it simplifies development and deployment, but deploying container systems can quickly get complicated if not approached in the right way. Operating containers at scale with multiple cloud providers comes with huge challenges and requires extensive planning. That’s where Kubernetes comes in.
If containerisation is a vehicle to aid in the delivery of applications, Kubernetes is the engine that powers it. It’s an open-source orchestration platform initially developed by Google that helps organisations to manage and scale containerised application environments. By automating processes, Kubernetes eliminates management complexities, unlocking the true potential of containers. It’s not the only option for container management, but it has rapidly become one of the most popular. A 2019 survey by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) found that containerisation had become the new norm, with 84% of deployment projects adopting the technology - a huge increase on the 23% adoption rate of 2016. The same survey found that 78% of those projects used Kubernetes for container orchestration.
Kubernetes is an important piece of the cloud-native puzzle, but when harnessed in the right way its value can extend even further. Containerisation is a critical component of any digital transformation journey, and in order to get the most out of orchestration tools like Kubernetes, companies will need to have qualified service providers with a deep understanding of its many nuances. These service providers will bridge the gap between developers and operators, providing support and ongoing operations management for running Kubernetes clusters in production. All of this will give IT leaders complete peace of mind that their container application environments will run effectively, boosting the entire organisation’s productivity.
Thanks to the popularisation of Kubernetes, there’s no shortage of Kubernetes operators out there. In fact, there are at least 177 of them at the time of writing this article, with many more materialising each year. There’s no getting around the fact that cloud-native is the future, so it’s important that organisations at the very beginning of their digital transformation processes reach out to Kubernetes certified hosting providers in order to get ahead of the game and truly capitalise on its potential.
