Introduction to Kubernetes #1

What is Kubernetes?

• Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool powered by Google.
• It helps us manage apps that are made of containers.

What problems does it solve ?

• Apps moving from a monolithic app structure to microservices comprise of isolated containers, and managing these containers can be a difficult task.
• Kubernetes guarantees
  1. High availability
  2. Scalability
  3. Disaster Recovery

Basic architecture

• There is one master node and connected to it are a couple of worker nodes.
• Each node has a kubelet running on it that enables it to connect to other nodes.
• Worker nodes are where the actual work is happening.
• The master node runs several processes that are important to run Kubernetes. These processes are:
  • API Server: This is a container that is an entry point to the Kubernetes cluster.
  • Controller Manager: Keeps track of what is happening in the cluster.
  • Scheduler: It is responsible for scheduling containers on different nodes.
  • Etcd: It is key-value storage that holds the current state of a Kubernetes cluster at any given time. This is the backing store of Kubernetes
• Worker nodes run heavier tasks than master nodes but the master nodes run more important tasks.

Basic Concepts

• Pod: A pod is the smallest unit that a Kubernetes user can interact with.
• On each worker node, there are multiple pods and on each pod, there are multiple containers.
• We usually have one pod per application.
• Each pod has its own self-containing server and its own internal IP addresses.
• These pods connect to each other using this internal IP address.
• If a pod dies a new pod is created which has a new IP address.

What is a service?

Definition: An abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods as a network service.

Pods get created and destroyed all the time in Kubernetes according to the need of the deployment. Every time a new pod is created it gets a new IP address and its connection with other pods gets lost. It would be inconvenient to adjust the IP addresses all the time. This is where services come to play.

A service is set in front of a pod(or replica of pods) and has its own IP address which is permanent.Clients use this IP address instead of the pods' IP addresses. So even if a pod dies and the IP address gets changed, it won't affect the communication between the the services.

Services have many functionalities, it has a permanent IP address and at the same time it is a load balancer.

More about it on the next blog :)
Stay Tuned!