11/19/23, 9:57 AM Do I Really Need Kubernetes?

- The New Stack

CI/CD / KUBERNETES

Do I Really Need Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is powerful, but that does not mean it’s the right choice for every team and
every app. It is made to solve a certain set of problems.
Oct 5th, 2020 9:37am by Ron Powell

Feature image via Pixabay.

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If you follow technology news, it might seem like Kubernetes is everywhere. It has
become hugely popular. In fact, developers and DevOps teams might feel like their
application development pipeline is hopelessly outdated if they aren’t using
Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for containerized applications. Starting with a

collection of Docker containers, Kubernetes can control resource allocation and
traffic management for cloud applications and microservices.

As such, it simplifies many aspects of running a service-oriented application

infrastructure. Along with modern continuous integration and continuous
deployment (CI/CD) tools, Kubernetes provides the basis for scaling these apps
without huge engineering effort.

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There’s a lot of excitement about using Kubernetes to manage cloud and hybrid
cloud environments. And it is a great tool. But teams often chase the hype and move
to Kubernetes prematurely, sometimes at a great cost in time, money, and developer
frustration.

In this article, we will try to look beyond the hype and help you answer the question:
do I actually need Kubernetes?

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What Does Kubernetes Do, Anyway?

Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for containerized applications. It is responsible
for:

Deploying
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Managing the scaling of containers and clusters

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Resource balancing containers and clusters

Traffic management for services

Kubernetes really shines when your application consists of multiple services running
in different containers. For a monolithic application with a static user base, this may
be more than necessary.

The task of building, testing and delivering your application to a container registry is
not part of Kubernetes. Here, CI/CD tools for building and testing applications do the
job. Kubernetes, as a part of a CI/CD pipeline, then helps you deploy changes to
production without any downtime.

Improve Your Monolith

Most applications start their life as a monolith, and this is great! With an entire
application in one place, it is quick and easy to make and deploy changes. But if your
app finds success and grows, you will soon need to find ways to scale it.

Does that mean it is time for Kubernetes? Probably not.

It is tempting to think that only microservices orchestrated via Kubernetes can scale
— you’ll read a lot of this on the internet. But scaling is usually more about the
application’s internals than about the high-level architecture and tooling. For
instance, you can scale a monolith by deploying multiple instances with a load
balancer that supports affinity flags.

A practical first step to consider when scaling an application is Test Driven

Development (TDD), which ensures quality and prevents defects as your application
grows. While smaller modules or services are easier to test, the modularity also
means increased demand for mocking, as well as additional tooling to configure and
maintain. Good testing makes it easier to build and scale your application
confidently.

As you start to scale out a monolith, configuration management tools like Chef and
Ansible come in handy. You can use them to automatically configure new servers to
ensure they are ready to run your application. You can even go a step further and
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When other parts of your application become a bottleneck — for example, the
database — you may scale those, too. Various patterns allow applications to scale
even though they are, by design, not very scalable. For example, if your database
becomes a bottleneck, you can move frequently-accessed data to a high-
performance in-memory data store, like Redis, to reduce the load on your database.

No matter what configuration management and provisioning tools you use, a good
CI/CD pipeline is a must. You might have copied a .zip file to your server via FTP the
first time you deployed your app, but that approach does not scale. A streamlined
CI/CD pipeline ensures that your application gets built, tested and deployed
automatically, without any extra work from you or your team.

Together, these practices will make your life easier if you do eventually need
Kubernetes.

You can even autoscale monolithic applications using cloud services like AWS Elastic
Beanstalk, Google App Engine, or Azure App Service. These all impose far less
administrative overhead than Kubernetes, and they all play nicely with CI/CD tools.

When working with a new application, focus on developing the best application
possible. Eventually, a complex tool like Kubernetes may be the right solution for
managing infrastructure for your application. As you grow, however, many of the
practices we’ve just discussed will be more practical.

Augment Your Monolith

As your application continues to grow, you will eventually reach a point where
continuing to add to the monolith seems untenable. This is often because the app is
near the limit of what a single dev team can work on.

At this point, many teams choose to split up their monolith and move fully into
microservices. While this is a rather popular decision, it is neither a necessary one nor
a silver bullet. Consider starting out by adding services that augment your
monolith instead of replacing it. Some of these support services may actually be
microservices — so you can benefit from using small services where it makes sense,
while still leveraging the benefits of your monolith.

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Even when introducing services and microservices, you may not need or want to
start with Kubernetes. Kubernetes excels at running and scaling pods of related
service and microservice containers. However, there are aspects of adopting
Kubernetes that are easy to overlook at first. For example, Kubernetes does not
include robust built-in tools for securing pods, nodes and clusters, and deploying
Kubernetes clusters across a multi-cloud environment can add a lot of complexity.

Starting with a single-cloud platform like Azure Service Fabric and AWS Fargate may
make it easier to spin up and scale services, without forcing you to take on
managing a Kubernetes cluster.

Another option is to avoid services with maintenance overhead altogether and

opt for Functions as a Service (FaaS), such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. FaaS
is a great way to minimize potential infrastructure overhead when adding services to
your application. Moreover, a Kubernetes-orchestrated cluster — if you eventually
need one — can be enhanced with FaaS capabilities. By starting with a mixture of
services and functions, the migration to Kubernetes is less complicated than it
sounds.

No More Monolith
Now imagine that your original monolithic application has grown so much that you
can barely see the original monolith.

Its needs and its user base have grown so far and so fast that you now have a wide
variety of helper services, many of which need to talk to each other. You need to
make sure the services that depend on each other are always running and visible to
each other.

In addition, your customers are demanding the kind of uptime and reliability that
make you consider running across multiple availability zones, possibly even across
multiple cloud vendors.

This is the point at which you probably need an orchestrator like Kubernetes. It
lets you easily define the modules (Pods) of related services and lets you
automatically scale them and load-balance between them.

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For Kubernetes to be useful, here is what it would require:

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You are willing to operate a couple of virtual machines

You can assign people to do configuration and maintenance of Kubernetes
You have more than a single service to take care of
You need to automate (as much as possible) a mostly homogenous service
deployment
You need to be cloud (or hosting) provider-agnostic

Furthermore, Kubernetes has built-in support for high-availability (Amazon RDS

Multi-AZ) deployments, which makes it easier to increase app reliability and
availability. Of course, it does impose overhead: it takes time and engineering
resources to create and manage clusters, define pods, and create containerized apps
suitable for deployment to Kubernetes. But if your app is big enough to benefit from
Kubernetes, the administrative overhead is worth it.

Conclusion
Kubernetes is powerful, but that does not mean it’s the right choice for every
team and every app. As with any piece of technology, it is made to solve a certain
set of problems. If you aren’t facing the problems Kubernetes aims to solve, it is
more trouble than it’s worth.

Don’t just give Kubernetes a place in your infrastructure toolbox. Make Kubernetes
earn it. Especially at the beginning of a new application.

First, use available tools to get the app out quickly. When your application reaches a
stage where deployment and scaling is becoming a job of its own, it makes sense to
start thinking about orchestration — and, quite naturally, Kubernetes as your
orchestration tool. Once you are ready, check out Getting started with Kubernetes:
how to set up your first cluster.

Ron Powell is senior manager of Marketing Insights and Strategy at CircleCI producing
content that enables developers to build, test and deploy their projects faster. He has a
background in space physics, having worked as a Cassini team member analyzing...

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Amazon Cloud and HashiCorp are sponsors of The New Stack.
TNS owner Insight Partners is an investor in: Pragma, Docker, Saturn.

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CircleCI is the leading continuous integration and delivery

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