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Feb 20, 2025
What is Kubernetes and what are the benefits?
As an application developer, you can't get around Kubernetes anymore. The open source platform for container orchestration is gaining more and more popularity, and that's not without reason. To understand its popularity, we first need to know what Kubernetes is, how Kubernetes as a container technology came about, and how this differs from virtual machines. In this blog post, we'll take you through the origins of Kubernetes, the ecosystem, and its benefits.
What exactly is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes (also known as k8s) is an open source system for easily managing large groups of containers and containerized applications. With Kubernetes, you can orchestrate components involved in hosting a containerized application: computing, networking, storage, and various types of workloads.
The history of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is Greek for 'helmsman for a ship'. It began as an open source project at Google to orchestrate and manage containerized applications. A number of Google engineers developed the software to urgently support the growing hyperscale infrastructure. To gather more knowledge, they decided to open-source Kubernetes.
This way, other engineers could benefit from the powerful software and contribute to its development. Today, the orchestration tool is used by more than half of the Fortune 100 companies.
Why is Kubernetes gaining so much popularity? And how does the ecosystem around Kubernetes help orchestrate containerized applications? To understand what Kubernetes does, we first dive into the world of containers and why they are increasingly being used.
In the video below, Kubernetes is explained using illustrations. Terms such as pods, replication controller, and namespaces are explained clearly.
Video: Kubernetes explained
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The world of Kubernetes: containers vs. virtual machines
Kubernetes is a system for managing containerized applications. This makes the world of Kubernetes fundamentally different from an application running on virtual machines. What are both hosting methods, and what are the differences?
What is a virtual machine?
A virtual machine (VM) is the software that transforms a physical server (hardware) into multiple virtual servers.
It is possible to run multiple virtual machines on a physical server through a hypervisor (special software for servers). The hypervisor essentially 'chops' the server into small pieces and distributes the components until multiple virtual machines are created.
Each virtual machine then consists of a complete copy of an operating system, the application (e.g., a website, related software for a database, etc.), and possibly necessary binaries and libraries. Virtual machines often consist of dozens of GBs and a lot of extra capacity you have to install but don't actually use to its full extent.
What are containers?
Containers are applications that can run only one or a few processes. This could be a smaller process, such as logging into an application or hosting a framework like NodeJS. Parts of these applications can be very compactly isolated in a container, so you only use the resources needed for that specific functionality or process. For example, you could use the Laravel framework for function X, and the Symfony framework for function Y. This is also a good foundation for developing microservices.
What is the difference between virtual machines and containers?
The difference between containers and virtual machines is most apparent when the number of users of a web application skyrockets. This means the app needs more resources, and multiple virtual machine instances of the app need to run.
Traditionally, this is always done by adding new virtual machines. However, this also means that you must host all the extras of a virtual machine: the operating system, the middleware (frameworks, libraries, server software), and the application itself (for example, WordPress and Magento). All together, quite a bit of computing power is deployed, while an application doesn't always necessarily need this. With containers, you only install what you need.
The below image of Docker illustrates this clearly.
What are the advantages of containers?
A frequently mentioned advantage of containers is the flexibility they offer. This gives developers more freedom of choice, ultimately resulting in improved development speed. Containers are also portable, meaning that a container can theoretically work seamlessly on a server, on-premise, desktop, or laptop. For example, you can install and configure the container locally and transfer it to a local or international cloud service provider - making it easier to deploy containers where they work best. It's also quick to add new capacity where needed.
Containers are particularly popular when creating a microservice architecture. Among internal development teams, it's popular because every developer uses exactly the same versions. There are no more local differences. A uniformity that you want to carry through to your production platform, so that all services are identical from development environment, to test environment, acceptance environment, and production environment.
Setting up Kubernetes: a significant challenge
Setting up Kubernetes involves many practices you might know from a Platform-as-a-Service provider (or from an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, such as Azure or Amazon Web Services). It consists of many options to tie everything together and create your ideal setup for a containerized application or a Kubernetes cluster.
Kubernetes is anything but simple. Setting up the available storage, infrastructure, load balancing, and IP allocation is a significant challenge. Also, for hosting popular frameworks, you would really want to build templates so that developers spend less time understanding the complexity of Kubernetes.
Are you facing a Kubernetes challenge?
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