How Kubernetes is used in Industries and what all use cases solved by the Kubernetes?

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do?

Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more.

Kubernetes provides you with:

• Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.
• Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.
• Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources
• Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
• Secret and configuration management Kubernetes let you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.

How Huawei Solve there Challenges with Kubernetes?

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. It designs, develops, and sells telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics.

Challenges

A multinational company that’s the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, Huawei has more than 180,000 employees. In order to support its fast business development around the globe, Huawei has eight data centres for its internal I.T. department, which have been running 800+ applications in 100K+ VMs to serve these 180,000 users. With the rapid increase of new applications, the cost and efficiency of management and deployment of VM-based apps all became critical challenges for business agility. “It’s very much a distributed system so we found that managing all of the tasks in a more consistent way is always a challenge,” says Peixin Hou, the company’s Chief Software Architect and Community Director for Open Source. “We wanted to move into a more agile and decent practice.”

Solution

After deciding to use container technology, Huawei began moving the internal I.T. department’s applications to run on Kubernetes. So far, about 30 per cent of these applications have been transferred to cloud-native.

Impact

“By the end of 2016, Huawei’s internal I.T. department managed more than 4,000 nodes with tens of thousands containers using a Kubernetes-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution,” says Hou. “The global deployment cycles decreased from a week to minutes, and the efficiency of application delivery has been improved 10 fold.” For the bottom line, he says, “We also see significant operating expense spending cut, in some circumstances 20–30 per cent, which we think is very helpful for our business.” Given the results Huawei has had internally — and the demand it is seeing externally — the company has also built the technologies into FusionStage™, the PaaS solution it offers its customers.