12/9/23, 5:44 PM What is Kubernetes?

| Why use Kubernetes & More | Mirantis

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Introduction to Cloud Native Concepts

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Getting Started With Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes

- How does Kubernetes work?

What is Kubernetes management?

What are Kubernetes Secrets?

What are Kubernetes pods?

What is Kubernetes Support?

What is Enterprise Kubernetes?

What is Kubernetes Orchestration?

What is Kubernetes Ingress?

What is Kubernetes multi-cluster?

What is Kubernetes hybrid cloud/multi-cloud?

Understanding Containers

What is a container registry?

Understanding Docker Swarm

What is Docker Swarm?

Virtualization

What is virtualization?

What is the software-defined data center?

Understanding Openstack

What is Openstack?

How to manually create an OpenStack image

How to work with images in OpenStack

Ecosystem

What is LOKI?

Mirantis Container Runtime vs Docker CE

What is the difference?

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12/9/23, 5:44 PM What is Kubernetes? | Why use Kubernetes & More | Mirantis

What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is software that automatically manages, scales, and
maintains multi-container workloads in desired states

Modern software is increasingly run as fleets of containers, sometimes called microservices. A complete application may comprise many
containers, all needing to work together in specific ways. Kubernetes is software that turns a collection of physical or virtual hosts (servers)
into a platform that:

Hosts containerized workloads, providing them with compute, storage, and network resources, and

Automatically manages large numbers of containerized applications — keeping them healthy and available by adapting to changes and
challenges

Get started with

GET STARTED

How does Kubernetes work?

1. When developers create a multi-container application, they plan out how all the parts fit and work together, how many of each
component should run, and roughly what should happen when challenges (e.g., lots of users logging in at once) are encountered.

2. They store their containerized application components in a container registry (local or remote) and capture this thinking in one or
several text files comprising aconfiguration. To start the application, they “apply” the configuration to Kubernetes.

3. Kubernetes job is to evaluate and implement this configuration and maintain it until told otherwise. It:

Analyzes the configuration, aligning its requirements with those of all the other application configurations running on the system

Finds resources appropriate for running the new containers (e.g., some containers might need resources like GPUs that aren’t
present on every host)

Grabs container images from the registry, starts up the new containers, and helps them connect to one another and to system
resources (e.g., persistent storage), so the application works as a whole

4. Then Kubernetes monitors everything, and when real events diverge from desired states, Kubernetes tries to fix things and adapt. For
example, if a container crashes, Kubernetes restarts it. If an underlying server fails, Kubernetes finds resources elsewhere to run the
containers that node was hosting. If traffic to an application suddenly spikes, Kubernetes can scale out containers to handle the
additional load, in conformance to rules and limits stated in the configuration.

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Why use Kubernetes?

One of the benefits of Kubernetes is that it makes building and running complex applications much simpler. Here’s a handful of the many
Kubernetes features:

Standard services like local DNS and basic load-balancing that most applications need, and are easy to use.

Standard behaviors (e.g., restart this container if it dies) that are easy to invoke, and do most of the work of keeping applications running,
available, and performant.

A standard set of abstract “objects” (called things like “pods,” “replicasets,” and “deployments”) that wrap around containers and make it
easy to build configurations around collections of containers.

A standard API that applications can call to easily enable more sophisticated behaviors, making it much easier to create applications
that manage other applications.

The simple answer to “what is Kubernetes used for” is that it saves developers and operators a great deal of time and effort, and lets them
focus on building features for their applications, instead of figuring out and implementing ways to keep their applications running well, at
scale.

By keeping applications running despite challenges (e.g., failed servers, crashed containers, traffic spikes, etc.) Kubernetes also reduces
business impacts, reduces the need for fire drills to bring broken applications back online, and protects against other liabilities, like the
costs of failing to comply with Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Where can I run Kubernetes?

Kubernetes also runs almost anywhere, on a wide range of Linux operating systems (worker nodes can also run on Windows Server). A
single Kubernetes cluster can span hundreds of bare-metal or virtual machines in a datacenter, private, or any public cloud. Kubernetes can
also run on developer desktops, edge servers, microservers like Raspberry Pis, or very small mobile and IoT devices and appliances.

With some forethought (and the right product and architectural choices) Kubernetes can even provide a functionally-consistent platform
across all these infrastructures. This means that applications and configurations composed and initially tested on a desktop Kubernetes
can move seamlessly and quickly to more-formal testing, large-scale production, edge, or IoT deployments. In principle, this means that
enterprises and organizations can build “hybrid” and “multi-clouds” across a range of platforms, quickly and economically solving capacity
problems without lock-in.

What is a Kubernetes cluster?

The K8s architecture is relatively simple. You never interact directly with the nodes hosting your application, but only with the control
plane, which presents an API and is in charge of scheduling and replicating groups of containers named Pods. Kubectl is the command line
interface that allows you to interact with the API to share the desired application state or gather detailed information on the
infrastructure’s current state.

Let’s look at the various pieces.

Nodes

Each node that hosts part of your distributed application does so by leveraging Docker or a similar container technology, such as Rocket
from CoreOS. The nodes also run two additional pieces of software: kube-proxy, which gives access to your running app, and kubelet,
which receives commands from the k8s control plane. Nodes can also run flannel, an etcd backed network fabric for containers.

Master

The control plane itself runs the API server (kube-apiserver), the scheduler (kube-scheduler), the controller manager (kube-controller-
manager) and etcd, a highly available key-value store for shared configuration and service discovery implementing the Raft consensus
Algorithm.

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What is “enterprise Kubernetes?”

Kubernetes, by itself, provides a core software framework for container and resource management, default services, plus an API. It’s
engineered to be extensible via standard interfaces to provide important capabilities like:

Running containers – a container runtime or ‘engine’

Letting containers communicate – a container network

Providing persistent storage – a container storage solution

Routing inbound traffic to containers in a secure and orderly way – an ingress solution

Full-featured load balancing – distributing inbound traffic evenly to container workloads – via integration with an external load-
balancing solution

… and many other components essential for efficient use and operations at scale. To make Kubernetes work at all — you or someone else
needs to choose and integrate solutions to fill these critical slots.

Kubernetes alternatives made available free of charge typically select from among open source alternatives to provide these capabilities.
These are often very good solutions for learning and small-scale use.

Organizations that want to use Kubernetes to run production software at scale need more, and more-mature functionality:

They need Kubernetes that’s feature-complete, hardened and secure, and easily integrated with centralized IT resources like directory
services, monitoring and observability, notifications and ticketing, and so on.

They need Kubernetes that can be deployed, scaled, managed, and updated in consistent ways, perhaps across many different kinds of
infrastructure.

They need all the different parts of Kubernetes to be validated together, and supported by a single vendor.

“Enterprise Kubernetes” refers to products and suites of products that answer these needs: that fill all of Kubernetes’ feature slots with
best-of-breed solutions, solve problems of Kubernetes management across multiple infrastructures, enable consistency, and provide
complete support.

How do I start using Kubernetes?

Mirantis makes several Kubernetes solutions, appropriate for different uses. Our open source products can be used free of charge, with
community support. Our flagship products can be trialed free of charge and are available with tiered support up to fully-managed services.

Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (formerly Docker Enterprise/UCP) is fully-baked Enterprise Kubernetes for development, testing, and
production. It includes the Universal Control Plane webUI for easy management, Mirantis Secure Registry (formerly Docker Trusted
Registry) for private container image storage and security scanning, and runs on Mirantis Container Runtime (formerly Docker Engine –
Enterprise) — a hardened container runtime with optional FIPS 140-2 encryption and other security and reliability features. (Download
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine)

K0S – (pronounced “K-zeroes”) is zero-friction, open source Kubernetes that starts with a single command and runs on almost any Linux at
almost any scale, from Raspberry Pis to giant datacenters. It’s our best choice for learners. (Download k0s – zero friction Kubernetes)

Finally, Lens – the open source Kubernetes IDE, accelerates Kubernetes learning and development. Lens lets you manage and interact
with multiple Kubernetes clusters easily using a context-aware terminal, visualize object hierarchies inside them, view container logs, log
directly into container command shells, and more. (Download Lens – the Kubernetes IDE)

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