Understanding Kubernetes

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🧱 Traditional Approach

• Earlier, companies owned physical servers to deploy their applications.

• This meant handling everything – networking, OS, hardware failures, scaling – manually.

☁️ Cloud Revolution: Enter AWS

• AWS (Amazon Web Services) introduced the concept of cloud computing.

• Instead of owning servers, developers could rent virtual machines from AWS.

• AWS managed hardware, and users only handled app logic.

🐞 Problem: "Works on My Machine"

• Even with cloud VMs, deployment issues remained:

  • App runs fine on dev machine but crashes on server.

• Why? Missing dependencies, different OS versions, bad configs.

🧳 Solution 1: Virtual Machines (VMs)

• VMs solve this by packaging:

  • App + OS + libraries + config into an isolated environment.

• But they’re heavy, slow to boot, and resource-hungry.

📦 Solution 2: Containers

• Containers (like Docker) solved VM’s weight issue by:

  • Sharing the host’s OS kernel, avoiding full OS installation.

  • Packing only what's needed to run the app.

• Lightweight, fast, and portable across systems.

But Who Manages 1000s of Containers?

• Container explosion led to orchestration issues:

  • How to deploy, scale, update, and restart containers across machines?

Google’s Solution → Borg

• Internally, Google built Borg, a container orchestration system to manage all this.

• But it was proprietary.

Enter Kubernetes (K8s)

• Google open-sourced a refined version of Borg: Kubernetes.

• It was donated to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) to ensure it stays cloud-agnostic.

From left to right:

• Physical Machine (manually managed)

• Virtual Machine (heavy but isolated)

• Container (light, portable)

• Kubernetes (manages containers at scale)

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☸️ What is Kubernetes?

• A cloud-agnostic container orchestration system.

• Handles:

  • Deployments

  • Scaling

  • Networking

  • Auto-healing

  • Load balancing

• Avoids vendor lock-in — works on AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, etc.

🧠 Kubernetes Architecture

Components of Kubernetes

🛡️ Control Plane – The Brain (Usually 1 machine)

Responsible for managing the entire Kubernetes cluster.

Think of it like a central command center with real-time cluster data & decision-making.

🛠️ Worker Node(s) – The Hands (2+ machines)

Run your actual app workloads.

A Pod (unit of deployment) holds your container(s), and is scheduled on one of the nodes.

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⚙️ Flow Example:

You ask to run 5 nginx containers. Here’s what happens:

1. You write a YAML or run kubectl apply -f nginx.yaml

2. The API Server gets this request → sends to Scheduler

3. Scheduler finds best-fit nodes → controller creates Pods

4. Kubelet on the chosen node starts the container via CRI

5. etcd stores all states

6. Kube-proxy handles traffic routing

7. If any pod crashes, controller sees mismatch → reschedules it

🔌 Cloud Controller Manager (CCM)

• Talks to your cloud provider’s API (e.g., AWS, Azure) for:

  • Load balancers

  • IP provisioning

  • Volume mounting

• Makes Kubernetes portable across any cloud provider.

Wrapping the introduction to Kubernetes video from Piyush Garg.