Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the concepts of the cloud and containers, and the evolution of computing over the last 20 to 30 years. In the era before the cloud, traditional deployments with one or a few applications per physical server caused a lot of inefficiency and wasted resources with underutilized hardware and high costs of ownership.

When virtualization technologies came along, it became possible to run many applications per physical server using VMs. This addressed the pitfalls of traditional deployments and allowed us to deliver new applications more quickly and with significantly lower costs.

Virtualization paved the way for the cloud services that are delivered via four different models today: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and FaaS or Serverless. Customer responsibilities differ by cloud service and delivery model.

This progress never stopped – now, cloud-native as an approach to building and running applications has emerged. Cloud-native applications are designed and built with an emphasis on scalability, resilience, ease of management, and a high degree of automation.

Over recent years, container technology has developed and gained momentum. Containers use virtualization at the OS level and each container represents a virtual OS environment. Containers are faster, more efficient, and more portable compared to VMs.

Containers enabled us to develop and manage modern applications based on a microservices architecture. Microservices were a step ahead compared to traditional monoliths – all-in-one, behemoth applications.

While containers are one of the most efficient ways to run cloud-native applications, it becomes hard to manage large numbers of containers. Therefore, containers are best managed using an orchestrator such as Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system that originated from Google and automates many operational aspects of containers. Kubernetes will schedule, start, stop, and restart containers and increase or decrease the number of containers based on the provided specification automatically. Kubernetes makes it possible to implement self-healing and autoscaling based on the current demand.