Intro

Moving on from the previous post from our Kubernetes 101 series, we saw what a Docker container is and how you can run it.

What happens when you need to coordinate and schedule many containers?

How do all the different containers talk to each other?

How can we scale many container instances?

This is where Kubernetes comes into picture.

Kubernetes is a popular open source platform for container orchestration. While there are other options, such as Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm, Kubernetes has become the industry standard.
Main Features

1️ Service discovery and load balancing

Kubernetes can expose a container using a DNS name or through its IP address.

If traffic to a single container is high, Kubernetes can take care of load balancing and distribute the network traffic so that your application stays up.

2️ Resource management

Given a cluster of nodes, we can define how much CPU and memory each container needs and Kubernetes will distribute the containers over the nodes, in order to make the best use of resources.

3️ Self healing

Containers that fail get restarted, new containers are deployed when creating a new version of your app, containers that don’t respond to health checks are killed and don’t receive traffic until they are ready to serve.

4️ Secret and configuration management

Kubernetes stores and manages sensitive information (passwords, OAuth tokens, SSH keys, etc.).

Secrets and application configuration can be updated and deployed without rebuilding your container images.

5️ Automated rollouts and rollbacks

Through YAML configuration files, you can define the desired state you want your application to be in and then rely on Kubernetes to maintain it.
Follow the Kubernetes 101 series on mindit.io.

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