Many organizations are intent upon moving workloads to the cloud as a way to improve their operational efficiency and lessen the burden on their internal IT departments. But moving to the cloud typically involves the containerization of those applications and the de facto orchestration layer for containers is Kubernetes, also referred to as K8. But how did it come to reign supreme in the cloud?
Although Kubernetes isn’t the only orchestration layer option for containers, it certainly is the predominant one. According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s annual survey from 2021, 96% of organizations said they were either using or evaluating Kubernetes and 93% said they were currently using, or planning to use, containers in production.
According to Catherine McGarvey, VP of software engineering for Tanzu at VMware, Kubernetes is a good option for enterprises that want to move their applications to the cloud because it provides a developer abstraction layer that makes the applications more portable and flexible. But she warns that using Kubernetes isn’t necessarily a turn-key experience.
“It’s not as easy as people think it will be and the amount of investment is high,” McGarvey said, adding that she views Kubernetes as a “starting point” for companies.
All roads lead to Kubernetes
McGarvey isn’t alone in her views. Stu Miniman, director of market insights for hybrid platforms at Red Hat, which is owned by IBM, said that Kubernetes is a great option for enterprises that need to scale their workloads in the cloud. He added that developers don’t really want to think about the underlying infrastructure, so by using Kubernetes as the container orchestration layer it can abstract the infrastructure away from higher-level services and applications. That makes applications a lot more portable and also adds flexibility to the architecture.
However, he added that while many enterprises have thousands of applications mostly running on containers, some of those applications are still using virtual machines (VMs). “The alternative to using containers is to use VMs and Kubernetes can sit on top of the VMs. Or we can use VMs and pull them into containers,” he said, adding that the line between containers and VMs is blurring. “All options lead back to containers.”
But not all enterprises will benefit from Kubernetes. Miniman said that if a company only has a few containerized applications, it probably doesn’t need Kubernetes. “You can do containers without Kubernetes.”
McGarvey agreed, adding that smaller companies with fewer applications would likely spend a lot of time and energy deploying Kubernetes without seeing a payoff for their investment.
Cost is often the deciding factor when it comes to using Kubernetes or forgoing the container orchestration layer, McGarvey said. If a company has lots of applications to move to the cloud and is willing to make a lot of upfront investment in the technology, McGarvey says that eventually it will see a lot of cost savings.
“After a lot of investment, you can optimize your costs,” McGarvey said. “And you will see a lot more capabilities in a programmatic way. That’s what makes it exciting.”
Change on the horizon
But there are new technologies on the horizon that may change the Kubernetes landscape. Miniman said that Web Assembly, or WASM, holds a lot of promise. WASM is a portable binary-code format that can be used in modern web browsers. WASM offers a way to run code on the web, which previously couldn’t be done.
McGarvey adds that while WASM is exciting because it may eliminate some layers in the application process, she believes it will have the most impact on the application development process and not necessarily circumvent Kubernetes. “You would still have to have a layer under WASM and Kubernetes is the best choice for now,” she said.
However, Miniman said he envisions some scenarios where WASM might make sense and Kubernetes will not. But like McGarvey he doesn’t believe WASM will replace Kubernetes. “We see it as complementary,” he said.
Kubernetes is rapidly becoming a mainstream technology for enterprises shifting their containerized applications to the cloud. And that trend doesn’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.