Anyone who works in IT, in any capacity connected to software will have heard Kubernetes more than once.
While the answer is obvious to anyone in the prog/dev space and many people outside, for others it’s really unclear. People keep trying to explain it to me but it sounds like gibberish. please ?
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It is hard to explain ELI5 because it depends on understanding abstractions that are decidedly not ELI5. The best explanation that I have is that hardware virtualization, so your traditional VMWare, virtualizes the hardware. You install an operating system by faking hardware to it, allowing you to run many independent computers on one piece of hardware.
Containers, the concept underpinning things like Kubernetes, virtualizes the *operating system*. So you install an application as if it is going into a regular environment, but really it is a container that is faking the OS. You can run many different applications on the hardware, each application *thinks* it is getting a fresh OS to install on, but the reality is it is a container. That way container A that has dependency c,d, and e can run on the same hardware that has container B that has dependency f,g,h that would typically interfere with application A. Yes, you can do this with hardware virtualization, but that is a heavier lift. Provided both applications can run on the style of OS as the host, you can load a bunch of containers providing each container a special little OS environment just for them.
The practical application, the fantasy, is that it allows developers to rapidly deploy applications including all of the dependencies directly to the environment without needing to wait for someone like me to prep it for them.
The reality is a little less rosey. Kubernetes is complicated, not a hell of a lot of people are good at it. “Images” tend to grow old and stale and contain a bunch of security holes no one is brave enough to address. There are pros and cons, don’t let anyone tell you that you can fix all of your problems if you just migrate to containers/Kubernetes. It isn’t all pro and no con. The pros might be worth the cons to you, but don’t fall for the hype.
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