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The Gorilla Guide to Kubernetes in the Enterprise — Chapter 2: Kubernetes Concepts and Architecture

This is an excerpt from The Gorilla Guide to Kubernetes in the Enterprise, written by Joep Piscaer. See Chapter 1: The Changing Development Landscape. You can download the full guide here.

Kubernetes: More than Just Container Orchestration

As stated before (but is worth stating again), Kubernetes is an open source platform for deploying and managing containers. It provides a container runtime, container orchestration, container-centric infrastructure orchestration, self-healing mechanisms, service discovery and load balancing. It's used for the deployment, scaling, management, and composition of application containers across clusters of hosts.

But Kubernetes is more than just a container orchestrator. It could be thought of as the operating system for cloud-native applications in the sense that it's the platform that applications run on, just as desktop applications run on MacOS, Windows, or Linux.

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The Gorilla Guide to Kubernetes in the Enterprise – Chapter 1: The Changing Development Landscape

This is an excerpt from The Gorilla Guide to Kubernetes in the Enterprise, written by Joep Piscaer. You can download the full guide here.

Software Delivery Has Evolved

The way we build and run applications has changed dramatically over the years. Traditionally, apps ran on top of physical machines. Those machines eventually became virtual. In both cases, the application and all its dependencies were installed on top of an OS.

This relationship between OS and applications created a tightly-coupled bundle of everything needed to run that application. Each virtual machine (VM) ran a complete OS, no matter how big or small the VM was, or how demanding the application on top.

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7 Key Services You Need Around Bare-Bone Kubernetes

Enterprise IT does not question the value of containerized applications anymore. Given the move to adopting DevOps and cloud-native architectures, it is critical to leverage container capabilities in order to enable digital transformation. Google's Kubernetes (K8s), an open source container orchestration system, has become the de facto standard — and the key enabler — for cloud-native applications, and the way they are architected, composed, deployed, and managed. Enterprises are using Kubernetes to create modern architectures composed of microservices and serverless functions which scale seamlessly.

However, two years of working with Kubernetes for enterprise applications, and large-scale production deployments have taught us valuable real-world lessons about the challenges of Kubernetes in the enterprise, and what it REALLY takes in order to make it ready for prime time and enable organizations to safely bet on Kubernetes to power mission-critical enterprise application. Large and complex enterprises that have invested in container-based applications often struggle to realize the value of Kubernetes and container technology, due to operational or day-two management challenges. In this post, we share seven fundamental capabilities large enterprises need to instrument around their Kubernetes investments in order to be able to effectively implement it and utilize it to drive their business.

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The Gorilla Guide to Serverless on Kubernetes, Chapter 4: What is Fission?

Fission: Open Source, Kubernetes-Native Serverless Framework

Fission is an open source, Kubernetes-native serverless functions framework with support for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Support for Kubernetes enables the portability of Fission functions with the ability to create once and deploy anywhere for consistency in code development. This accelerates your software delivery pipeline without sacrificing quality.

Fission is made up of three core concepts: