The number of organizations that are creating or running applications with Kubernetes, either directly or indirectly, is likely to be very high as the adoption of Kubernetes continues to skyrocket. A survey conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and released in February 2022 found that 93 percent of respondents were using or planning to use containers in production, and 96 percent of respondents said their organizations were either using or evaluating Kubernetes. Both of these findings were published in the same month. As a direct result of this, the total number of developers worldwide who use Kubernetes has increased by 67 percent to 5.6 million, compared to the year 2020, when there were only 3.9 million Kubernetes developers. To get started with your Kubernetes training, you should first become familiar with the software and the various components it contains at a high level. If you have never used Kubernetes before, you should begin by enrolling in a Kubernetes course.
Kubernetes is a platform that manages the entirety of the application lifecycle, including aspects such as scheduling, self-healing, and elasticity. This not only makes application management in production easier but also requires development teams to think in terms of containers first.
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Software developers have varying levels of experience and expertise, in addition to a wide range of job responsibilities. Although they may have a master’s degree or have attended a coding Bootcamp and be fluent in Python, JavaScript, or one of the many other popular languages, some people only have a surface-level understanding of Kubernetes. Others may have experience with Linux, Unix, JavaScript, or other languages and develop applications that run on VMs, but they may have gaps in their knowledge regarding how Kubernetes is related to the applications and code that they develop.
Let us look at some of the important skills and understanding that are essential to Kubernetes.
- How to manage the entire lifecycle of containerized applications that are orchestrated by Kubernetes, including packaging, sharing, and management: In order to package an application, developers need to be familiar with Docker or Buildpacks, as well as configuration-management tools like Helm or Kustomize, troubleshooting tools like kubectl CLI, and monitoring dashboards. They need to be able to configure packages so that they can run on a Kubernetes cluster, and this configuration must take into account all of the dependencies that the application needs.
- Security checks for environments that are distributed: The fact that Kubernetes is so widely distributed can make clusters especially susceptible to being attacked. An intruder who has gained access to an exposed port may be able to access an entire cluster environment and compromise any stateful data that is associated with it once they have gained access to the port. Because of this, there needs to be a shift to the left in terms of security, which means that it is now the responsibility of the developer to use tools and processes to check for security vulnerabilities in code while it is still being developed.
- Application Security: Kubernetes provides a wide variety of tools, such as network policies, well-defined ingress rules, and container-security contexts, that can be used to manage secure access to an application and exert control over the capabilities of a container. Because security is moving to the left and DevSecOps is becoming more popular, developers need to broaden their skill sets and learn how to use the tools that are available.
- The selection of appropriate tools for the CI/CD process: In many instances, developers will be a part of the process of selecting the appropriate tools. In addition to becoming familiar with the intricacies of Kubernetes, it is essential to have an in-depth understanding of the various tool sets that you will be working with. This is important not only for the continuous integration (CI) workflow (think Jenkins) but also for the continuous development workflow and the management workflow.
- The configuration of pods and the manner in which they interact with other services: According to Kubernetes.io, a Pod can either represent a single container or a set of containers that are located within a cluster. It is described as “the smallest, most basic deployable objects in Kubernetes.” The developer may or may not be required to have an in-depth understanding of the complexities of pod configuration and management, but at the very least, it is necessary for them to be familiar with the fundamentals.
- Once deployed, the following describes how containerized applications will function and how they will integrate with other applications and platforms: The interaction between Kubernetes and a stateless application, which is a workflow that does not save client data generated in one session for use in the next session with the same client and is an example of a microservice, is something that developers need to be familiar with. When it comes to stateful applications and data management, the developer should have a deeper understanding than a surface-level familiarity of storage and disaster recovery solutions, such as when MySQL and other databases are being used.
- Familiarity with the various environments for deployment: In theory, a Kubernetes application is a template that has already been pre-built and is ready for production. This template is also interoperable with any Kubernetes environment. Despite this, it is typically up to the developer to reconfigure the application so that it can be deployed in a variety of environments. This may involve load balancers, DNS, and a large number of other configurations that are related to the network. This is true whether the application is running on AWS, Google Cloud, or on-premises. Even though there are tools and platforms that might help to solve interoperability problems, difficulties can still arise, and it is typically the responsibility of the development team to address these issues and find solutions.
- Technical expertise in networking: When developing applications for Kubernetes, developers need to have a deep understanding of storage and how to recover from failures.
The path to becoming an expert Kubernetes developer may at first appear intimidating, but it also has the potential to be interesting and even enjoyable. Learning how to develop applications for Kubernetes environments can be accomplished in a variety of ways, depending on the preferences of the learner. These include classroom instruction and demonstrations, reading books and white papers, engaging in one-on-one instruction, and participating in hands-on labs.