Why should you use Kubernetes? Benefits for your organization

If you want to develop and deploy your digital products in the cloud with ease, you will need reliable tools. Kubernetes allows enterprises to deploy and manage cloud-native applications. Is it the right solution for your organization? Read our article to learn more about the benefits and practical applications of Kubernetes.

It’s important to choose the right tools in order to remain competitive in one’s industry. Modern enterprises have to provide the values their customers demand (new features, applications, services etc.) within appropriate time-frames. How can you ensure the quick release of your digital products? If you leverage technologies and approaches that grant you the biggest possible amount of business flexibility, you’ll be able to easily adjust to any situation and carry out the development process in no time. More and more companies now follow the microservice approach. Microservice systems consist of multiple, independent units which can be easily modified without significantly reducing the efficiency of the entire system. Software is commonly deployed and managed in the cloud in containers, and Kubernetes is a popular, open source solution often picked by professionals and companies to manage containerized workloads and services.

What is Kubernetes, and what are its business use cases? 

As an open source platform, Kubernetes has a rather large community. Everyone can use it, improve it, and ask other users for advice. This solution enables managing containerized workloads and services. If you need a reliable system that will make dealing with this whole process easier, you should consider adding Kubernetes to your tech stack. It will provide you with a framework for running distributed systems efficiently, without problems or delays. Kubernetes is able to offer these advantages thanks to its many innovative features and tools. 

What can you do with Kubernetes?

Process automation makes your team’s work simpler and allows them to focus on tasks and issues which actually require human intelligence. Kubernetes saves you time and energy by restarting containers that have failed and dealing with non-responsive ones on its own. All you have to do is to set it up. It will take care of your containers based on your predefined health check list. You can also set how much CPU and RAM each container needs, so the platform will manage your resources more efficiently. With Kubernetes, you can predefine the desired state for your deployed containers. The platform enables you to then control the rate of the shift from a container’s current state to your described state. 

You will also gain additional time thanks to Kubernetes’s capability to store and manage sensitive information such as passwords, authorization tokens and SSH keys. This may not seem like such a big deal, but it really increases user comfort. Deploying and updating an application’s configuration doesn’t require you to rebuild your containers. 

Kubernetes is capable of exposing containers that use a DNS name or use their own IP address. Kubernetes deals with loading the balance and distributing the network traffic, and in this way it ensures stable deployment. Its storage orchestration capabilities allow you to mount a storage system of your choice automatically. You can use local storage, a public cloud or other storage solutions. 

The benefits of using Kubernetes

There are many advantages of using Kubernetes, but there are also other, alternative solutions you can consider for managing your containerized workloads (like AWS Fargate, Google Cloud Run, Docker Swarm and many others). What makes Kubernetes better than those, and why should you choose it for your business?

Optimized application development process

Apart from the functionalities we have already described, Kubernetes comes with various other solutions and tools that make development and release processes easier, hence they can be carried out in a reduced amount of time. You can use this platform to optimize your container and resource management, make the most of them and develop applications in even short time-frames. It simplifies managing your team’s work, especially when the application architecture is based on microservices. Development can be broken down into smaller groups, and your groups of employees can create multiple features or deal with many challenges at the same time.

Improved software scalability

With Kubernetes, you can scale applications and the infrastructure resources up and down whenever you need it. Your requirements may change (it actually happens quite often), but with this platform, you can be sure that you will easily adjust your product and resource usage to meet your current needs. This is possible thanks to autoscaling APIs (such as HPA and VPA), among other solutions in Kubernetes. The platform can dynamically request new resources when needed and scale down its usage if they are no longer necessary (to prevent wasting resources). 

Reduced IT expenses

First of all, Kubernetes is open source – which means that you don’t have to pay to use it. It will of course take some time to configure this solution and learn how to use it efficiently, but it can save you a lot of money. Second, Kubernetes leverages somewhat intelligent, dynamic container administration. It ensures scalability (so your company performance will remain high), but at the same time, it leverages resource allocation to adjust its usage (so, resources are used according to your needs). This automation saves time, and as you surely know – time is money. With various tasks managed automatically, your IT team members can focus on those projects and challenges that really require their attention. Less time spent on repeatable, manual jobs means more time for work that really makes a difference. 

Simplified cloud migration

Each company has its own challenges to overcome and its own specific business needs, but probably most of them can solve at least some of their problems by moving to the cloud. There are many providers and types of clouds and cloud services for you to consider. Kubernetes enables organizations to simplify and accelerate the process of migrating applications from an on-premises environment to the cloud they select. Moreover, there are many methodologies for migration to the cloud. One of the recommended approaches is replatforming. If you choose it, your applications will stay the same in general. They will be migrated to a cloud environment where an instance of Kubernetes is running.

Better flexibility

All of the benefits of Kubernetes mentioned so far make it a really reliable and flexible solution that helps IT teams to work more efficiently (in terms of budget and the time). Containerization and Kubernetes enable you to take advantage of hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Such an approach is simply taking the best of both worlds. It gives you access to all the resources you need. Thanks to that, you are not only able to boost your company’s performance, but also prepare yourself for potential, unexpected challenges. 

How can you start using Kubernetes in your company?

Implementing new solutions in a company always requires a well-prepared strategy and – sometimes – additional training for your staff. Of course, there is no reason to rush this process. Learning curve of Kubernetes from DevOps and Software Engineer perspective may be challenging at the beginning, but with help of our experts we can make it more smooth. You should learn as much as you can about the platform you are considering for your business, as well as learning about its alternatives. Contact us, if you want to learn more about Kubernetes.