Companies often approach us with a similar problem. Following the principle of “solving problems as they arise”, they postpone infrastructure development until the moment when traffic grows. At the beginning of the journey, these were small companies that needed one server and a couple of developers to make everything work. Updates were carried out without a deployment system. And if a problem arose, you could simply roll back to the latest stable version, business metrics did not suffer from this. When the issue of infrastructure development arose , the price of each error was already calculated in millions. To avoid such problems, we adhere to the highload approach from the very beginning and implement Kubernetes with the first lines of code.
Automating the Process with Kubernetes
In the field of application development, many are familiar with the Docker tool. It is used to isolate an application in containers, the code is separated from the hardware, which allows you to manage the service and deploy it in different environments.
Kubernetes, a software for managing, grouping and configuring containers, often works in conjunction with Docker. Kubernetes automates many processes and helps deploy a service on multiple virtual machines at the same time. advertising database And the more services, the more significant the benefits of using Kubernetes.
Despite the significant savings in time and resources, the software is surrounded by myths, which stops many from implementing it.
Myth 1: Kubernetes is hard to use
Don’t be fooled by your first impressions; there are several factors that contribute to learning Kubernetes:
- Detailed official documentation provides answers to many questions.
- As the tool’s popularity grew, an active community was formed, which also shared its developments.
- The Helm package manager takes care prepare for contingencies of many of these tasks. It makes it easy to package, configure, and deploy applications, like Python ‘s pip or Unix’s Apt.
- Kubeapps is a free tool for Helm that serves as a catalog of ready-made solutions. If you are a fan of fully custom development, use Kubeapps as a template.
- Another advantage of Kubernetes is the ability to scale horizontally and vertically: parallelize traffic between replicas, allocate more productive machines and/or turn off underloaded ones. This is a more pragmatic approach to resource distribution.
Myth 2 – This is a costly solution
There is a belief that Kubernetes is heavy and resource-intensive compared to other tools. For comfortable work, the minimum cluster configuration includes 5-6 servers with dual-core CPUs and 4 GB of RAM. In high-load projects, we use 8 GB of RAM on the main node — a server in Kubernetes terminology. Such requirements for machines contradict our assertion that Kubernetes is available on weak hardware.
The solution is K3S. This is a new, lightweight belgium numbers distribution released in 2019. It is optimized to run on machines that do not meet the technical requirements of classic Kubernetes. This allows you to deploy a cluster with a smaller memory footprint. Using K3S, you get Kubernetes with a binary file smaller than 40 MB, which requires 512 MB of RAM and about 75 MB on the worker node. It is easy to install and run on Raspberry Pi.
If these figures are too high, the distribution can be simplified even further by abandoning Docker. Instead, K3S works with Containerid, which creates the containerization environment.