Where do Kubernetes Clusters hold significance in your app modernization journey?
What’s the most important element to modernizing an application? Unless major overhaul is required in terms of the very objective of the application, chances are that the answer is to bring the structure of the app up-to-date.
A major part of application modernization is re-architecture of the application. Legacy applications are most often monolithic in their structure; a key part of modern app development involves containerizing these apps and moving them to the cloud. This improves efficiency, maintainability, and ease of migration when needed.
Kubernetes offers the benefits of auto-scaling and security features, and is the best solution for container-based app modernization.
Kubernetes architecture
In Kubernetes, containers are the basis of application architecture. Each Kubernetes Cluster contains services or microservices, each of which contains pods or containers. The Kubernetes control plane automatically schedules pods across the various nodes, or worker machines, in the cluster. Each node can contain multiple pods.
Easy deployment of services/microservices
When developing a workload while modernizing an application, we first create the Kubernetes cluster and deploy the microservice. Inside the cluster, it automatically creates the containers/pods required. Without the Kubernetes clusters, we would be unable to deploy any services at all.
On the other hand, with K8s clusters, service deployment becomes very easy. The development process begins with creating a container image. We then push this into the Container Registry, which stores all container images. To deploy a service, we create a deployment file to configure from where to retrieve the image; it fetches and deploys the container image. And that’s it!
Security and scaling
Two of the major advantages of Kubernetes are its auto scaling and security features. Using the cluster autoscaler, the number of nodes in a given node pool can be automatically resized based on workload demands. There’s no manual intervention required to add or remove nodes, or to over-provision your node pools — instead, once you have specified the node pool’s minimum and maximum size, the rest is automatic. When we take on a project, we don’t need to auto-scale in the development environment, as we can add on auto-scaling during production without issue.
Kubernetes offers a number of ways to help secure your workloads. Since protecting workloads involves many layers of the stack, a layered approach to security is preferable, and an option available via Google Kubernetes Engine. When providing users with access, Kubernetes allows us to follow the principle of least privilege on a granular level, giving each user a different level of access as required. That way, each layer can be accessed only by those who need to do so, after making the tradeoff between flexibility and security.
Kubernetes containerized development is the best way to create efficient, secure and scalable tech products. That’s why at CloudNow, our experts are well-versed in the usage of Kubernetes clusters in development. Do contact us to discuss how we can get started with your development journey.
