If you are a new-age developer the chances of hearing about the orchestration platform Kubernetes would be a minimum of 3 times a day. In recent years, Kubernetes has been increasingly adopted by developers as it helps them to deploy container-based workflows for software development.
A yearly survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2022 found that 96% of enterprises are using or evaluating Kubernetes as their orchestration tool. Without any doubt, Kubernetes has demonstrated impressive growth to become a mainstream global technology. The CNCF 2022 survey also pointed to the adoption of the highest usage of any orchestration tool since the survey began in 2016.
In fact, many enterprises are also adopting DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) best practices to enhance applications’ consistency.
According to the reports published on Statista, about 46% of the world’s top organizations already adopted Kubernetes by the end of 2021. The platform manages to achieve such popularity mainly because of the support it gained from professional programmers and the coder’s communities across the world.
Using Kubernetes for software development resulted in significant improvements in delivery and reliability. It helps developers to maintain unique development environments when developing and shipping containerized applications.
Apart from that, here are a few factors that created hype on Kubernetes among developers.
– It is easy and simple to manage for the developers
– It helps to manage resources effectively
– Kubernetes delivers agility and reliability to the developers
– It helps in reducing the operational cost
– It provides the guarantee of high availability & performance
– Automated deployments are possible with Kubernetes for developers
All the above-mentioned aspects along with various Kubernetes tools for developers make it easy to manage containerized applications. For applications that require horizontal scalability like web, big data, and infrastructural services, the Kubernetes platform is considered the best choice for applications that require horizontal scalability. These applications include the web, big data, infrastructural services, and more!
Challenges to the adoption of the development process with Kubernetes to developers
Without any doubt, Kubernetes is considered an ideal solution to most microservice application delivery problems. However, it also brings some technology platforms as well as setup and management-related challenges, which are unique to Kubernetes only. Kubernetes for developers is advantageous if an appropriate container orchestration solution is selected properly and challenges are addressed instantly.
In addition, the cloud systems and on-premises systems may face deployment issues when multiple departments within the IT organization are not conversant with Kubernetes. Other than that, here are some predominant challenges Kubernetes mentioned. Let’s take a deeper look:
1. Diverse Development Process
Developers need to understand that the Kubernetes platform is not replacing the traditional development process. Developers can add Kubernetes to them. Basically, software developers prefer to work in a local environment to gain full control when they know their codes and how it is going to work. However, the complication raised when using Kubernetes would be adding containers & microservices stuff because they can’t run locally and it requires Kubernetes clusters. This is where DevOps developers experience their struggle and start to lose control over the workspace and resources.
To avoid such situations, an organization can prefer a self-service approach. This can eliminate the negotiation and ops gain control over the resources and architectures instead of between developers and operations. This leads to guardrails standards and cloud-native app deployment.
2. Poor Documentation
Kubernetes platform is very modular and developers can access numerous resources. So, combining those resources to tackle a particular problem will be very difficult. In addition, as the platform is still in its evolving stage, so for developers, it’s hard to keep up with their documentation.
Developers need to search online to spot the recent or perfect example of how to do certain things; this makes it more challenging for them. However, it’s important to note that the platform is still the best place for those who are familiar with the resources and concepts.
3. YAML Files
The Kubernetes platform uses YAML files for configuration. Though YAML files are easy to read and write, the documentation of YAML is never going to be clear about how things are working. Apart from that, Kubernetes requires a lot of YAML manifest and config files which will be daunting and overwhelming for beginning developers.
To avoid this, developers can eliminate the manual creation of YAML files through automation by introducing HELM packages.
Kubernetes tools for developers: An overview of how they are useful for developers
Developers noted great improvements in the development process right after the implementation of Kubernetes tools despite all those challenges they face. Here are a few interesting features of Kubernetes that are handy for developers.
Automated Failure Management: Unexpected failures may happen at any time. So, moving from manual resource management to automated management of Kubernetes for developers leads to being more efficient.
Multi-Cloud: Kubernetes platform offers a multi-cloud strategy and supports cloud-native applications on multiple cloud platforms. This eliminates the risk of single vendor dependency among developers.
Scaling: Developers do not need to worry about scaling their applications with Kubernetes as businesses start growing. The platform scales itself automatically and efficiently to meet the application demands.
GitOps: The Kubernetes platform’s operating model is GitOps. This allows for continuous delivery of codes through automation. Also, running automated tests, and new application deployments become much easier.
Kubernetes tools for developers – An extensive list for 2022 & beyond
Kubernetes is an industry-standard platform that enables business enterprises to adopt the microservices-based and container-driven approach for delivering software. The Kubernetes ecosystem allows enterprises to develop comprehensive applications by matching diverse requirements.
Let’s briefly understand the best tools of Kubernetes for developers so that they may turn the ideas or requirements of their users into enterprise-grade applications and help them to enhance their business application development work.
1. KubeAudit
KubeAudit is one of the best Kubernetes tools for developers from Shopify’s team. Being a command line tool and a Go package, it offers excellent audit features to enterprises to analyze the security flaws of Kubernetes clusters, including:
- Drop scary capabilities, don’t add new ones
- Don’t run privileged
- Use a read-only root filesystem
- Run as non-root, and so on.
The user-friendly interface of this KubeAudit tool does a great job for enterprises in identifying the presence of security issues in the Kubernetes clusters easily and quickly. The tool gets updated by the Shopify team with useful features to ensure the efficiency of the tool meets the expectations and demands of the enterprises.
2. Polaris
Polaris is one of the popular Policy-Management Kubernetes tools for developers that offer a set of AdmissionControl checks on the Kubernetes platform. Often the AdmissionControl checks of Polaris are applicable for security, networking, and the general practices involved in Kubernetes clusters.
This Kubernetes tool works excellently on a single cluster and helps them to configure Kubernetes pods and controllers using Kubernetes best practices. The presence of a simplified and easy-to-use UI dashboard is a great addition for enterprises to visualize their Kubernetes cluster.
3. Gatekeeper
The Gatekeeper is considered one of the best Kubernetes tools for developers from Open Policy Agent. This tool is almost similar to Polaris which helps enterprises to create and maintain policies. The Open Policy Agent is a framework that offers excellent extensibility and malleability that allows enterprises to create new rules by customizing the existing rules created by others.
In addition, this Gatekeeper tool excels in audit functionality that helps enterprises to build their own complete audit trail in case of policy rules violation. In addition, Gatekeeper also enables administrators in defining policies with a constraint. Here, the constraint is a set of conditions that allow or deny deployment behaviors in Kubernetes. Gatekeeper can also:
- Dry-run policy changes – It offers mechanisms to check policy impact and range before enforcement.
- Audit existing policies – to make sure security controls of apps with new and existing workloads (audit controls).
- Roll out policies – It applies policy in a slow-scoped manner to limit the risk of disrupting workloads.
4. Audit2RBAC
This Audit2RBAC is a small utility tool by Kubernetes that helps enterprises to identify and leverage the benefits of RBAC policy. In general, RBAC policy plays a handy role for enterprises in managing and utilizing Kubernetes audit log resources.
The utility tool Audit2RBAC takes the Audit log of Kubernetes as its input and delivers a reasonable RBAC policy as its output. The generated RBAC policy will help utilize the resources your business is working with.
5. Kube-Hunter
Kube-Hunter is one of the well-known offensive Kubernetes tools for developers from Aquasec that hunts for security weaknesses in Kubernetes clusters. The tool is used to increase responsiveness and visibility of the security controls in Kubernetes environments. Pentester and Red-Teamer mostly prefer this Kube-Hunter tool to exploit all the vulnerabilities of Kubernetes clusters remotely or locally. As this tool is meant to identify and exploit vulnerabilities, enterprises should not consider this lightly.
6. Kubectl
Kubectl is a default CLI tool for the Kubernetes platform supporting all the operations carried by the platform. This tool supports kubeconfig files from others and the Docker users can easily interact with the API servers. The commands of Kubectl are almost similar to Docker with only a few minor differences.
7. Kubernetes Dashboard
Kubernetes Dashboard is one of the popular web-based Kubernetes tools for developers that suits well for small cluster businesses. The tool provides an excellent User Interface that helps enterprises to manage the Kubernetes platform very well. The tasks handled by the Kubernetes Dashboard tool are:
– Discovery
– Load Balancing
– Monitoring
– Easy troubleshooting
Apart from that, this tool helps businesses to monitor the aggregate CPU and memory usage along with the workloads. The installation of this Kubernetes Dashboard tool is pretty straightforward as it comes in ready-made YAML templates. The mobile version of this tool offers a similar version to the popular platform Android and iOS.
8. Falco
Falco is one of the most popular Kubernetes tools for developers that play a key role in runtime security. This tool helps businesses to detect any unusual activities in their containers. With a single set of rules and a greater focus on the kernel system call, the Falco tool monitors the multiple layers of the containers.
Also, this tool assists enterprises to build their own set of rules for each Kubernetes cluster and provides native support. Falco for runtime detection can offer many benefits like:
- Leveraging existing detection rules to alert on malicious activity and CVE exploits
- Minimizing risk through immediate alerts
- Strengthening cloud security and detecting threats across containers and hosts
Here’s why enterprises should embrace Kubernetes
Almost every business now experiencing a digital transformation and software has been inevitable for a business to deliver a high-quality unified customer experience. The business benefits offered by software innovation are intended to take the business process to the next level but the IT capabilities of an organization need to provide the desired support to make the changes more effective.
This is where Kubernetes for developers comes into play. It is an open-source platform that helps business leaders to manage their software applications or software deployment automatically. In the recent past, Kubernetes for developers has emerged as the de-facto standard for building strong digital architecture for businesses to achieve their goals and objectives.
The business capabilities of the Kubernetes platform allow a business to improve their IT standards by building high-degree customization, system capacities, system scalabilities, system securities, optimizing IT costs, and many more to bring efficiency to meet the challenges of the digital world.
Here, we have curated a list of some basic business capabilities of the Kubernetes platform that allows large or small businesses to achieve digital maturity for tackling all those digital industry challenges.
1. Provides an Enterprise-wide Cloud Program
The decade-long digital journey of business enterprises has now been transformed to move on with cloud technology. The move toward cloud technology will help business enterprises to dominate their IT landscape. The traditional life-cycle has always involved challenges for management, now with digital cloud technology businesses can create a new market and achieve high margins in various business areas. Above all, digital business models drive businesses towards delivering better customer experience.
As the cloud platform helps businesses to develop agile capabilities in a short time, the time taken for launching new products in the market gets reduced significantly. Also, cloud-platform plays a key role in cost reduction and eases management difficulties. The Kubernetes platform will be the right choice for business that looks for more in the cloud platform; the platform delivers excellent support in a very large range including moving the business operation to SaaS-model.
2. Migrates Legacy Business Applications to Modern Cloud-technology
These days, businesses around the world prefer to move to a SaaS-based business model for delivering better consumer services. The business benefits of the SaaS model in the consumer world and Salesforce is pretty successful for enterprises in building strong business applications with siloed data. Many top-level enterprises like Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, and so prefer this platform strategy to deliver diverse services to their consumers.
However, the SaaS model requires businesses to run or own scalable infrastructure which makes enterprises depend a lot on vendors. The Kubernetes platform and the IT ecosystem help businesses to build such capabilities to deliver excellent application components with various value-added features. In addition, the Kubernetes platform offers fidelity and an easy portability option that eliminates the risk of vendor dependability for enterprises.
3. Cloud-native Architectures for Greenfield Applications
Modern companies prefer Greenfield Applications to deliver a single view of consumer or transaction without considering the backend system and the services offered. Greenfield applications are specifically designed to work seamlessly across devices/channels. Mostly financial service, telecommunication, and business retail service providers prefer this type of application for achieving a single view of transactions/consumers. Moving such Greenfield applications to the cloud-native environment will give the ability for enterprises to deliver dynamic support in many sectors including development, handling a large number of users, operations, distribution, and so.
The Kubernetes platform is the ideal choice for businesses to handle Greenfield applications. Here are the key strategic areas that make Kubernetes the best for enterprises.
- The platform empowers enterprises to build excellent Greenfield architecture without server dependency and supports microservices.
- The deployment of Greenfield applications in cloud-native architectures using Kubernetes allows enterprises to operate applications with service meshes, serverless computing, and Chaos engineering concepts.
- Prompts enterprises involved in retail, financial, and telecommunication sectors to adopt private cloud.
4. Robust Digital Transformation Via Hybrid Cloud Strategy
The public clouds often deliver panoply services which may not suit well for enterprises seeking massive scalable digital platforms. Also, the public cloud will lead toward a suboptimal situation on business flexibility and also on cost. However, moving the cloud-based deployment of legacy and Greenfield applications to a hybrid cloud strategy will benefit a lot in many aspects like cost optimization, better IT utilization, agility, and portability.
The Kubernetes platform confers business applications with cloud independence and saves a lot of costs by allowing enterprises to move with a private cloud. The hybrid cloud strategy supported by the Kubernetes platform allows Greenfield applications to deliver seamless serverless functions and microservices using DevOps processes.
5. Enhances Digital Transformation Activities
In today’s competitive business world, digital transformation is the ultimate weapon that allows businesses to survive and compete. Digitalizing the business applications will allow business enterprises to reuse them and access other services through APIs. In addition, digitalization offers to simplify operations, reduces IT costs, promotes development independently, and enables the faster release of new products.
It doesn’t matter whether those business applications are running on the public cloud or private cloud, it is best to build the application in the Kubernetes platform. This empowers the applications to run seamlessly on the same technology ever after the deployment of several versions.
Kubernetes tools for developers to improve the development process
The Deployment of Kubernetes allows business enterprises to build pods and replica sets with an official statement with proper description. Also, enterprises can control and monitor the deployment process whether it matches the desired state or not. Unlike the traditional software deployment, the Kubernetes application with an excellent deployment strategy will allow enterprises to define their application and how to create, upgrade and downgrade.
Moreover, Kubernetes helps businesses in different rolling out deployment strategies to launch application updates efficiently and avoid or minimize downtime. Take a look at the deployment strategies offered by the Kubernetes platform.
- Rolling Deployment – Replacing pods from the old version with new ones without cluster downtime.
- Recreate – Deploying new versions by terminating all existing old pods.
- Ramped Slow Rollout – Rolling out the new version replacement process by handling the old version shutting operation in
parallel. - Best-effort Controlled Rollout – Measures the maximum unavailable parameters while updating the old pods, this allows
enterprises to roll out more quickly. - Canary Deployment – Follows a progressive delivery approach, where updating a new version serves a small pool of test users
once it is successful it will roll out to more users.
To summarize, the majority of the Kubernetes resources offer a wide range of benefits to developers for improving the application development process along with offering ease to operate could-native applications. Overall, Kubernetes is a platform that allows developers to build platforms.
