Understanding Kubernetes Cloud-Native Computing

Summary

Kubernetes is ”the predominant cloud-native orchestration system in the world,” said Said Ouissal, founder and CEO of ZEDEDA at his company’s Transform Edge Computing conference earlier this year. “Computing is all about extending the cloud to the edge, so, logically, customers have been looking for ways to take cloud-native apps and deploy them using Kubernetes at the edge.”

Kubernetes is open-source software for running and managing large cloud-native workloads. As such, it enables and supports the trend toward open-source software. It also is important to understand as more and more industrial companies refine their computing architectures to make the most of cloud and edge computing.
Originally designed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it is used for automating software deployment and management. The name “Kubernetes” originates from Greek, meaning “helmsman” or “pilot” and it defines a set of building blocks (or “primitives”) that collectively provide the mechanisms to deploy, maintain, and scale applications based on CPU, memory or custom metrics.

The technology works with CRI-O, an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-based implementation of Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface. OCI is a Linux Foundation project started in 2015 to design open standards for operating-system-level virtualization (software containers), most importantly Linux containers. CRI-O allows Kubernetes to be container-runtime-agnostic. Multiple distributions of this platform are in use, from independent software vendors (ISVs) as well as from the major public cloud vendors.

Kubernetes is loosely coupled and extensible to meet different workloads. The internal components as well as extensions and containers that run on Kubernetes rely on the Kubernetes API. The platform exerts its control over compute and storage resources by defining resources as “objects,” which can then be managed as such.
Kubernetes follows the primary/replica architecture. The components of Kubernetes can be divided into those that manage an individual node and those that are part of the control plane.

According to Sai Vennam, a developer advocate for IBM Cloud, Kubernetes and the broader container ecosystem “are maturing into a general-purpose computing platform and ecosystem that rivals—if not surpasses—virtual machines (VMs) as the basic building blocks of modern cloud infrastructure and applications.” This ecosystem enables organizations to deliver a high-productivity Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) systems that address multiple infrastructure-related and operations-related tasks and issues surrounding cloud-native development so development teams can focus solely on coding and innovation, he said.

According to Ouissal, running Kubernetes at the edge has very little to do with Kubernetes itself, and everything to do with how to enable Kubernetes at the edge. “The biggest challenge is how to orchestrate Kubernetes environments at the edge, how to secure them, how to manage them, and how to monitor at scale,” he said.

ZEDEDA launched a partnership with SUSE in 2021 using a lightweight Kubernetes implementation, some smart software, and application programming interfaces (APIs). “One of the key aspects of open source is that you can [address] a lot more security concerns in various levels because of the transparency you get with open source. It is very powerful for introducing, moving quickly, and deploying different use cases,” said ZEDEDA Founder and CTO Erik Nordmark.

Larry Morris, director of product management at SUSE, added: “There are so many different open-source projects. Whatever your use case, whatever your particular need, there probably is an open-source alternative to a proprietary software that you can look to with many people contributing.”

Read about ZEDEDA's Transform Edge Computing conference.