What’s a Kubernetes Cluster?

18 March 2021

In this article we will talk about Kubernetes Clusters, what they are, how they are used and what advantages and benefits they bring within companies’ infrastructures.

Kubernetes (also known as K8s or Kube) is an opensource, portable and extensible platform, used to manage workloads and containerized services, automating them and eliminating many of the manual processes during deployment operations inside companies and institutions’ IT departments.

Nowadays, we are in the era of “Deployment in container” (started with the introduction of Docker® in 2013). Containers, compared to virtual machines, offer more efficiency and cost benefits. In addition, they feature a lighter insulation model, sharing the operating system between applications. Therefore, containers offer a more agile management and a more flexible infrastructure.

The great success of containerized infrastructure, has led to the rapid spread of platforms for the container management, that allow you to manage complexities typical of the life cycle of applications and multi-container systems.

Kubernetes is the most famous.

This tool, designed and developed within the Google laboratories over 15 years ago, and transformed into opensource in 2014, it is organized in clusters, which is a collection of nodes running containerized applications. Google itself contributes significantly to the Kubernetes opensource community, generating more than 2 billion containers’ deployments per week and developing and running all of its activities in containers.

But what is meant by Kubernetes Cluster?

The cluster is the cornerstone of Kubernetes, as it offers the ability to plan and to run containers in a group of machines of any type: physical or virtual, on premise or in the cloud.

The simplest configuration of a Kubernetes cluster includes a Master Node, which hosts the Control Pane and a set of Worker Nodes, dedicated to the execution of containerized user workloads. The control plan is concerned with maintaining the desired state of the cluster, while the nodes actually execute applications and workloads.

The infrastructure servers can be interconnected both through an Internal Network, dedicated to communication between the Control Pane and the Worker Nodes, and through an External Network, dedicated to accessing applications and services running on the Worker Nodes.

New generation applications are, therefore, designed as micro-service architectures and are implemented through a set of containers: every container performs a a specific function. The Kubernetes cluster is now the standard infrastructure to host multi-container applications, because it guarantees an efficient distribution on multiple servers and a high reliability of the different containers, offering functionality to easily manage deployment, scheduling and load balancing operations, even in the most complex application scenarios.

It is also guaranteed scalability and integrity over time, greatly improving the whole IT security of the company.

Kubernetes must also integrate with networks, storage, security and other services, to provide a full container infrastructure.

E4 has created its own Container Platform, KAPTAIN, a High Performance Kubernetes Cluster, an “orchestra conductor” to develop and distribute complex applications faster and, above all, ensure an efficient use of the underlying infrastructure.

We conclude this article by asking you a peculiar question: What do a Kubernetes Cluster and our home wardrobe have in common? We will tell you about it in one of the next articles! Stay tuned!

Do you want to know more? Download the KAPTAIN Reference Architecture or Contact Us!