Containers, Docker and Kubernetes. We hear so much about them these days, but the tech moves so fast that it can be challenging to understand what they are and the impact they will have.
Dive into this session to get a foundational container education. Find out what they are and why they are gaining so much traction in the development community.
You will get a technical overview of containers and Kubernetes, and learn how to get started using VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. The speakers employ terms and use cases relatable to infrastructure engineers. You will also see demos of this technology in action using VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu and learn more about the VMware Tanzu portfolio.
Don’t have time to watch the full session? Here’s a rundown of key takeaways:
1. Virtualization, which abstracts the underlying infrastructure, offers advantages such as resource utilization, efficiency, flexibility, hardware independency and sustainability. However, running applications in virtual machines can have disadvantages such as resource overhead due to running both the guest OS and the application.
2. Containerization, on the other hand, abstracts the operating system dependencies towards the application which results in certain advantages. Advantages include more efficient resource utilization and being lightweight and portable. Furthermore, containers are immutable, and isolated and shorten the software development cycle.
3. Containers and Kubernetes provide a more granular level of control, improved resource utilization, and faster deployment times, which are crucial for agile development and DevOps practices.
4. Building and running a container involves packaging the application and its dependencies into an image, which can be run as a container using a container engine. Docker images consist of different layers. Layers of a Docker image are essentially just files generated from running some commands. Layers are efficient because multiple images can reuse them, saving disk space and reducing the time to build images while maintaining their integrity.
5. Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It uses a declarative approach to define the desired state of applications and manages the creation and destruction of pods, which are the smallest deployable units in Kubernetes.
6. Pods are groups of one or more containers that share an IP address and port space. They can find each other via localhost and share the same data volumes. A Kubernetes deployment is a resource object in Kubernetes that provides declarative updates, dynamic scaling, updating, and rollback of applications.
7. Services in Kubernetes provide an abstract way to expose applications running as pods on Kubernetes. Services enable network access to a set of Pods, regardless of which individual pod within the set is responding to the request. This is critical in a distributed system like Kubernetes, where Pods are created and destroyed to match the desired state and can change IP addresses. Services can have different types, such as ClusterIP, NodePort, and LoadBalancer.
8. Namespaces in Kubernetes are logical partitions within the cluster that separate multiple teams or apps. They provide controlled access to resources and limit resource consumption for specific namespaces.
9. VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of solutions and services for modernizing applications and infrastructure with a common goal. Delivering better software to production, continuously. It’s a suite designed by VMware to enable customers to build, run, and manage Kubernetes-controlled container-based applications both on-premises and in the public cloud. Tanzu provides operational readiness, skill transformation, and automated Kubernetes platform operations.
10. A VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster is a fully conformant Kubernetes cluster provided by VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters are designed to offer enterprise-grade Kubernetes environments that can be deployed using either a declarative approach by describing the desired state of a cluster in a manifest (yaml) file or by either using VMware’s global control-plane solution VMware Tanzu Mission Control.
11. To get started with containers and Kubernetes, attendees were recommended to start with free tools like Docker Desktop, Podman or KinD. VMware Fusion or Workstation also provides an easy way to quickly get started with running and managing containers and Kubernetes clusters locally on Intel-based computers.
12. Additional resources, such as blogs, videos, and quick start guides, are provided via the VMware Tanzu Developer Center and Tanzu Tech Zone to help attendees on their Kubernetes and Tanzu journey.
Want more VMware Explore? Dive into our full video library for unlimited learning at your own pace. And stay up to date with the latest product announcements on the official Tanzu blog.
