Guide to Kubernetes

Here at Densify, we are getting more and more questions about Kubernetes, containers and related management challenges. This ten-part guide is dedicated to addressing some of the most common questions we receive as an in-depth article series, so that Kubernetes administrators and architects may benefit from our experience. We are also providing a form at the bottom of this page, so that our readers can submit topic suggestions for future articles.

What is Kubernetes?

Originally released by Google on July 10, 2015 as a version 1.0, Kubernetes provides a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts” (source). The open source Kubernetes project (sometimes abbreviated as K8s) is now overseen by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is in turn part of the Linux Foundation. In its June 2020 survey of 1,324 respondents, CNCF found that 83% of those surveyed use Kubernetes, up from 58% in 2018.

Kubernetes Tools & Best Practices

The typical questions that we receive can be generally categorized into two groups:

• Tooling
• Best Practices

The tooling questions are usually related to free and open source versions of popular associated tooling used in the industry. One common area of difficulty our customers face is in understanding the functional overlap or coverage between tooling options. For example, Terraform may be used to provision a cluster on AWS EKS, however some users ask whether they could or should also use eksctl, kubectl, CloudFormation, or kOps.

The chapters in this Kubernetes guide will address these challenges and more, including a walkthrough of core Kubernetes concepts and best practices.