Canonical Kubernetes: Bringing flexibility to Kubernetes with an enterprise-grade

Swaleha Parvin
4 min readJan 11, 2023

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Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. In simple terms, it is a way to organise and manage groups of containers (the containers can be thought of as lightweight, stand-alone applications) that are running on multiple machines.

Canonical Kubernetes is a distribution of Kubernetes that is curated and maintained by Canoncial (company behind ubuntu) and it is designed to work seamlessly across multiple cloud platforms. It includes features such as automatic updates, integrated load balancing, and multi-cloud support, which make it easy to deploy and operate Kubernetes clusters on different cloud providers, such as AWS, GCP, and Azure, or on-premises.

Canonical Kubernetes is intended to provide a consistent Kubernetes experience across different environments, which can simplify operations and reduce the complexity of managing multiple clusters. It’s platform-agnostic, meaning it allows deploying, scaling and managing kubernetes cluster without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. It also provides features for backup and recovery, monitoring, load balancing and more. It’s also designed to make it easy to upgrade the cluster to new versions of Kubernetes with minimal disruption to running workloads.

What is Container Orchestration?

Container orchestration refers to the management of containers as a single entity, rather than as individual, isolated units. It is the process of coordinating and automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerised applications. The goal of container orchestration is to simplify the process of deploying and managing containerised applications in a distributed environment by automating many of the manual steps that are required to manage containers manually.

Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm and Mesos, provide a set of APIs and tools that can be used to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containers across a cluster of machines. This includes features such as automatic scaling, self-healing, service discovery, load balancing, and rolling updates. These tools also provide a centralised view of the entire cluster, making it easier for administrators to monitor and manage the containers.

In short, container orchestration is managing, scaling and maintaining a set of container in a cluster.

What is a Kubernetes cluster?

A Kubernetes cluster is a set of machines, called nodes, that are used to run containerised applications. The nodes in a cluster can be physical machines or virtual machines, and are typically spread across multiple availability zones or data centers for high availability.

At the heart of a Kubernetes cluster is a control plane, which is responsible for managing the state of the cluster and ensuring that the desired state of the cluster matches the actual state. The control plane includes a number of components, such as the API server, etcd, and the controller manager, that work together to manage the state of the cluster.

Each node in the cluster runs a container runtime, such as Docker, and is managed by the Kubernetes control plane. The nodes run one or more pods, which are the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes. Pods contain one or more containers and shared storage and network resources.

How Kubernetes Can Help You Build And Scale Applications?

kubernetes advantages

Kubernetes has a number of advantages over other container orchestration solutions:

  1. Scalability: Kubernetes allows you to easily scale your applications up and down based on demand. It can automatically add or remove nodes from the cluster to ensure that your applications have the resources they need to function properly.
  2. High availability: Kubernetes ensures that your applications are always available by automatically scheduling multiple replicas of your containers across different nodes in the cluster. It can also automatically failover to a replica if a node goes down.
  3. Automatic load balancing: Kubernetes automatically load balances traffic across the different replicas of your application, ensuring that your applications can handle a high level of traffic.
  4. Self-healing: Kubernetes can automatically detect and restart failed containers and even reschedule them on healthy nodes to ensure that your applications are always running.
  5. Flexibility: Kubernetes can run on a wide variety of infrastructure, from on-premises data centers to public clouds, making it a flexible solution that can adapt to your specific needs.
  6. Comprehensive and active ecosystem: Kubernetes has a large and active community, which provides a lot of resources, tutorials, and tools to help users getting started and running applications effectively.
  7. Simple service discovery: Kubernetes has built-in service discovery, which makes it easy for containers to discover and communicate with each other.
  8. Easy rollouts and rollbacks: With Kubernetes it is easy to rollout and rollback changes to your applications, allowing you to test new features and rollback if something goes wrong.

You can explore more about Kubernetes by visiting below URLs.

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Swaleha Parvin
Swaleha Parvin

Written by Swaleha Parvin

A Tech Enthusiast | I constantly learn new software concept and blog about it

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