FAQ: Kubernetes and Digital Transformation

Hi, community; my last post on this subject was in Portuguese. Sorry, I translated it 😊

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Hey! Here, I present a small set of questions and answers (FAQ) to help you understand the relationship between Kubernetes and Digital Transformation in organizations. I hope this is useful, especially for those just starting their Kubernetes journey!

1) How is Kubernetes associated with Digital Transformation?

2) In which areas can Kubernetes contribute to the transformation of organizations?

3) How are organizations deploying Kubernetes?

4) Kubernetes is an open-source project. How can organizations benefit from this?

5) What is the relationship between Kubernetes, DevOps and DevSecOps?

6) Cybercrimes are reaching alarming rates, and security is a top priority. How to handle cybersecurity in Kubernetes?

7) Will containers and Kubernetes replace server virtualization technology?

8) What will Kubernetes look like in the future?

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1) How is Kubernetes associated with Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation is a challenge that demands changes in companies, such as the use of cloud-native technologies, greater agility in processes, intensive use of automation, and the development of a collaborative culture within the organization.

Cloud-native applications are hosted in containers, allowing the isolation of the application and all the components necessary/related for its execution. In other words, with containers, we can be sure that the application will work properly, whether implemented in a public or private cloud environment – it is decoupled from the infrastructure. This feature is critical for companies to implement a multi-cloud strategy.

Kubernetes has quickly become the industry standard for centrally managing large numbers of containers. It is an open-source project initiated by Google and currently governed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Kubernetes aims to simplify the deployment and operation of container-based environments, allow companies to utilize their infrastructure resources better, and have integrated features that allow orchestration of the application lifecycle.

Additionally, recent research shows that at least 90% of business leaders agree that cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, are helping transform how companies operate and deliver value to their customers.

2) In which areas can Kubernetes contribute to the transformation of organizations?

Kubernetes is one of the main tools available that allows increased business agility as it allows IT teams to stop dedicating so much time to managing infrastructure.

As software development processes become automated, new applications' launch and deployment cycle is significantly reduced, allowing companies to adapt more quickly to market changes and add more value to their offerings.

Additionally, Kubernetes' native autoscaling capability helps optimize the use of infrastructure resources and reduces costs. This capacity is very much in line with the elasticity and on-demand consumption characteristics that public cloud services already provide. Both allow IT teams to avoid failures due to a lack of resources and avoid paying for idle resources.

Another benefit of Kubernetes related to digital transformation is that it helps implement hybrid and multi-cloud adoption strategies. Its application portability capacity provides freedom of choice and good interoperability between different providers, measured in PTO (portability time objective).

As applications are developed, deployed, and managed using the same core set of Kubernetes features, they can be deployed or migrated between private, public, and edge clouds in a more user-friendly way.

On the other hand, the topic of DevX, or developer experience, is also critical in digital transformation. How developers interact with the resources needed to get work done can affect business strategy execution, productivity, company competitiveness, and customer satisfaction. Kubernetes, without a doubt, contributes significantly to improving the experience of developers as actions on the infrastructure are now defined by developers through code.

3) How are organizations deploying Kubernetes?

A recent report shows that among organizations that have already deployed Kubernetes, 46% of them have adopted a hybrid cloud model, and 44% have implemented a fully hosted deployment in the public cloud. Additionally, 53% of respondents plan to add or increase the capacity of their Kubernetes environments using different public cloud providers.

The multi-cloud Kubernetes deployment strategy is primarily driven by the need to reduce technological dependence on a single provider. It also aims to seek greater flexibility in cost management, enable high availability for applications, and deliver capacity for disaster recovery.

Furthermore, this same report revealed that organizations are moving away from the “do it yourself” or “do it yourself” (DIY) implementation mod

We must remember that Kubernetes represents only part of the components necessary for the perfect delivery and implementation of applications. Even with all the benefits of Kubernetes, other essential elements are still needed for containers to go live in a production environment.

In addition to there being more than 100 Kubernetes distributions available on the market, there are also hundreds of projects hosted at CNCF related to all the stages necessary for the implementation and operation of container-based environments: security, telemetry, observability, image registration, service mesh, service proxy, network, and so on.

Integrating these components and delivering a validated platform ready for operation is exhaustive and expensive work. Furthermore, these tasks are not directly related to the business purpose of most companies.

Therefore, organizations are increasingly adopting turn-key Kubernetes platforms, deployed on-prem or in public cloud services, capable of adding all the necessary complementary components and providing specialized, high-level technical support.

4) Kubernetes is an open-source project. How can organizations benefit from this?

Open-source projects allow anyone to access, modify, and distribute the code. They are developed in a decentralized and collaborative way, involving companies and individuals around the world.

Therefore, in general, open-source projects can deliver new features and innovations more quickly than proprietary code. They can also allow the creation of more reliable software as their revisions and problem corrections are more frequent, as a large group of collaborators maintains them.

As an illustration, according to CNCF figures, the Kubernetes project alone received more than 2.7 million contributions and more than 430 thousand code updates/commits in the last year alone.

Large companies also actively collaborate on new features and updates, as many use Kubernetes as an “upstream” project for their solutions and market distributions. And this ends up creating a standard in the IT industry.

5) What is the relationship between Kubernetes, DevOps and DevSecOps?

DevOps and security are related to cultural changes within the organization, as they require great collaboration between team members

Traditionally, security was not an element considered in software development. In the practice of DevSecOps, security concerns must be applied from the beginning of the software development cycle, that is, from the moment the application requirements are specified.

Ensuring consistency in DevOps and DevSecOps collaboration activities is a challenge that can directly impact process agility. Therefore, automation is widely used in application development, testing, and provisioning stages.

There are many ways to implement automation, including solutions that allow the definition and deployment of infrastructure through code (IaC). However, they can add complexity to the software development cycle, especially in container-based environments.

Kubernetes has enormous synergy with DevOps and DevSecOps as it has native mechanisms that enable complete automation of containers and related elements, making the development cycle simpler, faster, more frequent and better managed.

In addition to automation, Kubernetes adds the ability to abstract infrastructure. Developers can focus on functionality and specify infrastructure-related dependencies, actions, and policies as a part of the developed code, using native Kubernetes APIs.

6) Cybercrimes are reaching alarming rates, and security is a top priority. How to handle cybersecurity in Kubernetes?

The treatment of security in Kubernetes is no different from that which should be applied to the IT environment as a whole. Kubernetes security is effectively integrated into organizations' cybersecurity policy.

Furthermore, it is necessary to provide security teams visibility into applications hosted in containers, seeking to integrate Kubernetes with other cybersecurity solutions that the company may use or is considering purchasing.

An essential action is to identify and contain vulnerabilities in the Kubernetes environment. Containment must begin by using images from trusted sources, checking the integrity of these images, making unauthorized access to cluster information difficult, and preventing privilege escalation.

Other security actions are also necessary, such as using secure hardware, defining access policies, and network micro-segmentation to prevent lateral movement and integrating with anti-virus and IDS/IPS systems. Adopting “sandbox” techniques to analyze and respond to incidents is also highly recommended.

Furthermore, the organization must be ready to recover the Kubernetes environment quickly during security incidents, relying on solutions that allow secure backup, replication, and disaster recovery policies.

7) Will containers and Kubernetes replace server virtualization technology?

Everything indicates that no, the hybrid model should prevail. In other words, server virtualization-based environments will continue to coexist with Kubernetes environments.

As not all monolithic applications are suitable or eligible for transformation to an architecture based on microservices, either due to high costs or due to intrinsic implementation characteristics, applications hosted on virtual servers will likely continue to exist for some time.

Furthermore, server virtualization technologies are widely used, have decades of market presence, and can deliver a robust and well-known set of tools for management and security.

For example, one of the fastest-growing projects at CNCF is the KubeVirt. This project allows Kubernetes to manage and control virtualized server environments based on a KVM hypervisor.

Some market suppliers also offer solutions that simultaneously allow the implementation and management of Kubernetes and virtualized environments.

We have had access to this feature just through public cloud services, where we can implement computing and Kubernetes services in the same private cloud (virtual private cloud) and manage them through the same console.

8) What will Kubernetes look like in the future?

The Kubernetes project still has a lot to evolve. Perhaps, soon, Kubernetes will become just another logical abstraction layer within the tools available to software developers.

Furthermore, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, which is already widely incorporated into software development processes, many of the barriers and difficulties still existing in Kubernetes tend to be overcome and abstracted.

Therefore, it is up to us to monitor and be attentive to these developments.