Defending the Value of
Kubernetes in the Cloud
David Linthicum
If you’re moving in the direction of
Kubernetes, here’s how to make both
a technology and a business case. Figure 2 looks at interest in Kubernetes, relative to
Swarm, Cloud Foundry and Apache Mesos. Keep in
mind that Cloud Foundry is more than just a cluster
manager standard/product.
Kubernetes was open sourced by Google in 2014. This
container orchestration engine is based upon Goo-
gle’s Borg technology that’s been running for many
years. Indeed, Google ran Kubernetes for more than
10 years, before containers became hot. Google had
been powering its own web services with it. So, let’s declare this technology a winner, and look at
what we need to do to make it work within our
enterprises.
Putting things into perspective, Kubernetes was
actually late to the container cluster manager/
orchestration party. As you may recall Apache Mesos
first entered the market in 2009. It began as technol-
ogy without a container role, until those who needed
to make containers scale put two and two together.
Despite Kubernetes only being out of beta for a short
time, more people now brag about their Kubernetes
skills than they do about Apache Mesos, Docker
Swarm or Cloud Foundry. Further validating the con-
tainers orchestration engine, Microsoft deepened its
investment and commitment to Kubernetes in early
April with the acquisition of Deis, a Kubernetes ser-
vices and support startup.
The hype and demand can also be measured by the
Stack Overflow questions that mention the different
container cluster managers. Indeed, Kubernetes
dominated the category, as the chart from Apprenda
reflects in Figure 1.
44 | THE DOPPLER | SPRING 2017
The Basics
Kubernetes consists of several architectural compo-
nents, including pods, labels, replication controllers
and services. They do the following:
• Pods are ephemeral units that manage one or
more tightly coupled containers.
• Replication controllers create new pod “repli-
cas” from a pod template to ensure that a con-
figurable number of pods are running.
• Services offer a low-overhead way to route
requests to a logical set of pod back ends in the
cluster, using label-driven selectors.
So, if you’re looking to run Kubernetes to manage
clusters of your containers, what will be the core
decisions that you have to make? In my opinion, they
include the following:
• To cloud or not to cloud? Keep in mind that you
can run Kubernetes on premises, as well as
within public clouds. Although, Google’s cloud