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bzinoun
bzinoun

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[ πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§ ] What Kubernetes is and what it is not

Two questions were very important to me when my interest was on Kubernetes :

  • What is Kubernetes ?
  • What Kubernetes is not ?

By answering to these two questions, i was sure to start from the right point and also know the responsibility of Kubernetes .

So let's make a pragmatic responses about that .

πŸ’‘What is Kubernetes ?

Kubernetes is a platform that wrap a huge number of services and capabilities ; these latter is growing day after day .
From a top level we can say , the core functionalities of Kubernetes is it's ability to manage containers across linux based infrastructure .
But Kubernetes brings also a lot of feature such as :

  • Managing Secrets
  • Checking applications Health
  • Scaling application : Scale app and down
  • Auto Scaling
  • Instance replication
  • Discovering resource
  • Naming Resource
  • Monitoring resource
  • Managing and mounting Storage system
  • Providing security component : Authorization , Authentication

In one sentence the responsibility of K8S is

Platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation.

⛔️ What Kubenetes is not ?

The Common mistake is to say Kubernetes is a Paas !

Kubernetes is not a platform as a service (Paas) , in my opinion Rancher is a Paas for Kubernetes , It provide a high level configuration for kubernetes and provide some default configuration for Kubernetes to .

In fact Kubernetes doesn't dictate many aspects of our system and leaves them up to us to manage them .

In facts Kubernetes does :

  • not require a specific application type or a dependency framework
  • not require a specific programming language
  • not provide any database
  • not provide any message queues
  • allow us to choose our logging system
  • allow us to choose our monitoring & alerting system
  • ..etc

That's all Folks


In the next post we will discuss the relation between K8S and containers . We will find response for questions such as :

  • What's benefits of containers
  • How we need to manage our containers
  • ...etc

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