Introduction
Kubernetes is one of the most popular open-source container orchestration software. It was developed by Google and later donated to Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and it’s used by thousands of companies around the world. Kubernetes is used for deploying, scaling, and managing applications in containers on cloud infrastructure.
According to Red Hat’s 2021 ‘State of Enterprise Open Source report,’ 85% of IT leaders consider Kubernetes pivotal to deploying cloud-native application strategies, and 72% of the IT leaders also affirmed the ever-increasing use of Kubernetes within their organization.
Furthermore, Gartner predicts that by 2022 more than 75% of organizations will be using containerized applications in the production environment, a considerable increase from a mere 30% in 2020.
In this blog, we have featured some use cases for Kubernetes for 2022 that might be intriguing for you to know:
1. Cloud-Native Application Development
Kubernetes is a great tool for developing cloud-native applications, especially for those who want to use Kubernetes as a platform rather than just a container orchestrator. It’s easy to deploy and scale apps on Kubernetes, which is something that its predecessor Docker Swarm doesn’t provide.
In 2022, it will be more common for developers to use Kubernetes as their primary platform or even as their only CI/CD solution because of its ability to create production-ready containers in no time.
2. Containerized Application Deployment
The containerized applications that run on Kubernetes are easy to deploy and manage, thanks to the Kubernetes container runtime, containerd. This open-source container runtime was developed by Google for use in Kubernetes and other cloud platforms. It can also be used as a standalone tool for running and deploying containers locally or on your own servers.
3. Container Orchestration
Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool, used to deploy and manage containerized applications. With its declarative configuration syntax, Kubernetes can be used to manage containerized applications across clusters of hosts.
4. Custom Scheduling and Self-healing
Kubernetes uses a scheduler to schedule pods. The scheduler ensures that the pods are running and healthy, and they ensure that they are scheduled in a way that meets the requirements of the user.
5. Horizontal Pod Scaling
Horizontal pod scaling is the act of increasing the number of containers in a pod. This can be done by adding additional replicas, and it’s used to increase the capacity of an existing application.
Horizontal pod scaling uses Kubernetes‘ replication controller feature to manage replica counts for pods, which would otherwise require manual intervention if you were using a cluster without horizontal scaling capabilities. The result is that you can manage your workloads in Kubernetes without having to worry about them becoming too large or small at any given time.
6. Monitoring, Logging, and Metrics Gathering
Monitoring, logging, and metrics gathering are very important for Kubernetes. They help you to understand the health of your cluster and also to troubleshoot issues when they occur. As a result, monitoring is one of the most popular use cases for Kubernetes.
Some examples of monitoring solutions include Prometheus (open source), Stackdriver (from Google), Papertrail (open source), Datadog (paid), or Heapster/InfluxDB/Grafana (Kubernetes‘ built-in solution). You can also use these tools for log collection: Fluentd, Logstash, or ELK stack.
7. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
You can use RBAC to enable fine-grained access control so that only authorized users have access to specific resources. You can also configure permissions at the cluster level, so if you want all new users who are added to your cluster to have read-only access, that’s what you can set up.
RBAC is a powerful security solution for Kubernetes clusters. It allows you to control who can access what resources and what those users can do with them. This helps ensure that people only have access when they need it, which helps reduce the risk of someone misusing your system or accidentally corrupting an important application or data set by making changes without permission.
8. Network Policy Management
Network policy management is the process of configuring network access rules for applications running on the Kubernetes cluster. Network policies are configured as a set of rules that determine which pods can talk to each other, which pods can communicate with external services, etc.
Network policy management is a critical part of securing Kubernetes because it makes sure that only required resources such as databases and services are accessible from outside the cluster. This way you can prevent your service from being compromised by malicious actors who might try to gain unauthorized access through backdoors or listening ports that were left open by accident.
9. Checking Service Health and Updating Deployment Images
One of the reasons Kubernetes is so popular is that it makes it easy to create and deploy applications. However, if you have many applications running on one cluster, you’re going to have more than just one problem at a time. Monitoring your services and making sure they’re healthy should be part of any good DevOps workflow. You can do that by checking their health or setting up alerts when something goes wrong-but how do you go about doing this? Here are some examples:
- Service Health Check – A simple TCP ping check against a port on all nodes in a cluster.
- Application Health Check – Verification that an application is able to respond with a 200 response code after connecting via HTTP request sent over HTTP/2; for example: “{ “name”: “redis“, “version”: “1.0” }”.
10. Configuration Management and Secrets Management
You’ve probably heard about Kubernetes support for configuration management tools, like Ansible and Puppet. In fact, it supports many of them: SaltStack, Terraform, HashiCorp Vault (for secrets management), and even Helm. If you are using a different tool today, you could easily switch to Kubernetes’s built-in support for your favorite one.
Kubernetes also supports many secret management tools-and not just HashiCorp Vault! They include AWS Secrets Manager and Azure Key Vault. If you need to use these products but don’t want to give up on the flexibility offered by Kubernetes when provisioning them for your cloud-native applications or services-or just need the fastest way possible to spin up an application on any cloud provider without worrying about secrets-you should seriously consider using Cloud Native Storage (CNS).
Conclusion
Kubernetes use cases are endless, so you need to evaluate your requirements first.
The top Kubernetes use cases featured in this article are the ones that have been implemented by companies already. But before we move on to them, it is important to understand that there are infinite possibilities for using Kubernetes in your company or project.
So try thinking about these use cases. What do they have in common? How do you choose one for your project?
Try to answer these questions before you get ahead on the road to deploying Kubernetes within your enterprise environment.
As you can see, there are many benefits to using Kubernetes. It is a powerful tool that can help with your deployment process, self-healing mechanisms, and more. However, before deciding whether it’s the right choice for your use case(s), it’s important to evaluate your requirements first!
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