K8s 101: Is Kubernetes essential for developers? Here’s how to start using it today

Kubernetes (also referred to as K8s) is an open source container orchestration system that helps automate processes relating to building, hosting, and running applications (or in our case, websites). 

If you’re in the website or web app world, then you likely know that containerization is leading the forefront of trends in the industry - and for good reason. Containers are simply an intuitive way to run applications, and these individual containers need management - otherwise, you’d have to do it manually, which gets out of hand quickly. 

If one container failed or stopped working, you’d need a replacement as soon as possible. Done manually, this is time-consuming and will inevitably lead to downtime. This is why Kubernetes exists and what we understand when we talk about container orchestration: You tell the system how your containers should look ideally, and Kubernetes will try to meet those requirements. 

This is how K8s helps tech teams everywhere save time and energy: Kubernetes provides the framework to automate your containers and manage their life cycles all at once.

K8s makes sure that all your applications in cloud environments run consistently by automating tasks like deploying, scaling, load-balancing, and lifecycle management. This eliminates the tedious, time-consuming, and manual work associated with deploying and scaling applications. 

And as you know, this is an enormous burden lifted from engineers’ shoulders. Because it’s all too easy to sink hours, even days, into dealing with manual tasks. 

For this very reason, Kubernetes is considered the most modern and future-facing approach for hosting, running, and managing containerized applications. Many tech leaders worry that without K8s on their teams, their site strategy is considerably weaker than the competition. 

Why is Kubernetes the best choice for site hosting and management? 

With Kubernetes’ dominance, especially as time goes on and containerization becomes the standard, demands are higher for tech teams to embrace it.

The number one reason for this is preventing outages or site downtime, which can be completely disastrous for a business. 

With Kubernetes under the hood, your system can manage containers in a way that ensures your apps stay up and running with less chance of avoidable downtime. And since everything is automated, apps can be brought to market much faster. 

To achieve this, you will most likely need to take different approaches in building applications, as the underlying foundation is vastly different from how applications have been built in the past - on old systems where you had a few static servers that never changed. 

With containers, your application will need to be able to react gracefully when it comes to failure modes, but this in turn makes the application much more resilient to issues that can arise.

The ability of Kubernetes to easily configure and provision new environments from existing, already-running infrastructure reduces the time taken to see the outcome of minor changes, launch new projects or seek collective feedback.

Common stressors like upgrading software, installing software, implementing security patches, and scaling can all be simplified, so your applications can continue to run smoothly without interruption. As Kubernetes continues to evolve at a rapid pace, more and more features are being added to improve lifecycle management capabilities. This allows for more customization and configuration than before.

See why modern enterprises have come to prefer K8s? It’s hard to think about going back to the “old way,” which means that engineers would have to do all the work in a much more old-fashioned way of thinking. 

If you’re a developer, Kubernetes should be able to make your life a lot easier. 

Is Kubernetes accessible to all development teams? 

It’s true that the benefits of Kubernetes seem almost endless - so what’s the catch? What are the drawbacks? Why are everyone and their development teams not using this for better results? 

One reason: Expertise. 

Kubernetes has a very steep learning curve. 

It’s time-consuming to learn, and it will take months or years to completely master. However, if you’re motivated, you certainly could learn and run Kubernetes on your own (and maybe you should!) 

But know this: It does take very specific expertise to configure the installation to fit your specific needs, your company’s needs, and learning everything just takes a lot of time and money. 

Along your Kubernetes journey, troubleshooting can become cumbersome, since there are no easy quick fixes or solutions. Since you’ll have to fix everything yourself and learn it as you go, many developers report that substantial time gets sunk into Kubernetes education and troubleshooting.

There’s nothing wrong with that, either, because good things take time - but most teams don’t have time to spare. Not even a couple of days, never mind a couple of weeks. 

Additionally, with new Kubernetes features released (and possibly deprecated) 2-3 times a year,  this places a large continuous learning burden on teams, especially if it’s not their primary role.

We’ve found that the bottom line is that most development teams love Kubernetes, want to use it, and think it could benefit their team tremendously - but they don’t have the time to sink into learning it, applying it, and working out all the kinks. 

Most teams want a solution that will benefit them now. (Or yesterday ;) )

How to start using Kubernetes immediately, with no experience at all 

amazee.io built and released the open source platform called Lagoon to bridge the gap between wanting to leverage Kubernetes, and having to learn Kubernetes.

Lagoon is the way we automate building and deploying pipelines for container applications. Lagoon transforms your application from source code into containers, then deploys it into a K8s cluster. Kubernetes then manages the deployment, scaling, and running of the application. 

Lagoon can be hosted anywhere in the world, and it automates the Kubernetes platforms behind both amazee.io’s offerings, Cloud and Dedicated Cloud. 

Our managed Kubernetes platform allows teams to start benefiting right away, even without learning K8s yet. Since the service is managed, our Kubernetes experts build and deploy clusters for you - in whichever infrastructure account you want. Your team may not know K8s now, but after working with our team, we can show you the ropes. 

We mentioned the time-consuming element of learning K8s yourself above. Our managed service eliminates all that risk since we are running and monitoring the platform for you 24/7. We also handle all upgrades and fixes, so your team is completely freed of these management burdens. 

The team of Kubernetes experts at amazee.io currently manages many thousands of workloads on dozens of Kubernetes clusters, of all shapes and sizes, across several vendors, in various regions around the globe.

This way you get the best of both worlds. Start reaping the benefits of K8s now, and let your team learn along the way, so they can eventually have the expertise and knowledge themselves

Another day without amazee.io is another day without all those great benefits of Kubernetes! If you’re interested in learning more about how your team could benefit from managed K8s, reach out for a free 15-minute consultation today.