The benefits of kubernetes and containers

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform, a system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

To understand Kubernetes, you must first understand what a container is. Like a virtual machine, a container encapsulates an application and all of its direct dependencies into packaged code. Containers are hyper portable and offer additional layers of security for your application.

Instead of one server running a single version of your application, now, a Kubernetes cluster hosts multiple instances of your containerized applications in various pods. The pods are a group of one or more containers with shared resources and can scale alongside each other.

Traditional cloud hosting or virtual servers can't scale. A DevOps team will create one (or many) servers of a specific size, depending on anticipated load and resources with each server set in size. If an application scales too far due to usage, it will consume all of the resources of its server and cause it to crash. Businesses prevent this by deploying servers larger than needed and, as a consequence, overpay for resources.

Another issue is that traditional cloud servers are inherently insecure. DevOps teams must go out of their way to lock down a server and ensure it's not susceptible to vulnerabilities. Once provisioned, the server software must be manually updated, adding more labor and additional maintenance costs.

To sum it up, traditional cloud virtual servers don’t scale, make you pay for more resources than your application needs, and quickly become outdated and insecure.

The key advantages of kubernetes and a containerized cloud host are:

1. Scalability: Containers sit in pods that are scaled up alongside each other in a Kubernetes cluster based on resource demand
2. Security: Containers abstract server resources, which are managed by the cloud host, minimizing the security that your team has to manage.
3. Portability: With Kubernetes, you can seamlessly move from one cloud provider to another or run a multi-cloud infrastructure with ease.
4. Cost: You only pay for the resources your application needs. Once configured, a Kubernetes cluster requires less maintenance than a traditional cloud host.

Choosing the right cloud provider for your business depends on the size and scale of your application and your team. We have experience with all cloud providers and have an extensive history with Google Cloud, despite it being the smallest cloud provider.

Google Cloud has many advantages for startups, but not as many for mid-tier or enterprise businesses looking for a larger infrastructure. For those businesses, we recommend hybrid or AWS, which has the largest infrastructure by far. Azure is also an enticing choice for the enterprise, as it provides outstanding documentation, competitive pricing, and a much larger infrastructure than Google that's enlarging on Amazon.

Kubernetes is the new industry standard. If you are running a growing business, your website and applications should be leveraging Kubernetes and containers. The downfalls of a traditional cloud host, outlined above, compared to the benefits of Kubernetes should make a compelling argument as to why your company should prioritize this upgrade today.

Need help leveraging containers? Tragic has a wealth of experience helping clients migrate cloud hosts, as well as optimizing their infrastructure for performance and cost savings.