We’re learning about Kubernetes in this series, and why it is a good choice for managing your containerized applications. In part 1, we talked about what Kubernetes does, and its architecture. Now we’ll compare Kubernetes to competing container managers.
One Key Piece of the Puzzle
As we discussed in part 1, managing containers at scale and building a distributed applications infrastructure requires building a large complex infrastructure. You need a continuous integration pipeline and a cluster of physical servers. You need automated systems management for testing and verifying container images, launching and managing containers, performing rolling updates and rollbacks, network self-discovery, and mechanisms to manage persistent services in an ephemeral environment.
Kubernetes is just one piece of this puzzle. But it is a very important piece that manages several important tasks (Figure 1). It tracks the state of the cluster, creates and manages networking rules, controls which nodes your containers run in, and monitors the containers. It is an API server, scheduler, and a controller. That is why it is called “Production-Grade Container Orchestration,” because Kubernetes is like the conductor of a manic orchestra, with a large cast of players that constantly come and go.
Other Solutions
Kubernetes is a mature and feature-rich solution for managing containerized applications. It is not the only container orchestrator, and there are four others that you might be familiar with.