Cluster API and Declarative Kubernetes Management

Chapter 1. Why Kubernetes Adoption Is Complex

Modern application design has moved from the creation of huge monoliths to a more flexible architecture based on microservices running in containers. Containers are small runtime environments that include the dependencies and configuration files the services need to run. Containers are the building blocks of the cloud native approach, enabling scalable applications in diverse environments, including public, private, and hybrid clouds, as well as bare metal and edge locations.

Beyond the significant advantage of empowering application development teams to work in parallel on different services without having to update the entirety of an application, the cloud native model offers a number of advantages over monolithic architecture from an infrastructure perspective. Containerized applications use resources more efficiently than virtual machines (VMs), can run in a broader variety of environments, and can be scaled more easily. These advantages have driven wide adoption of microservice-based architecture, containers, and the predominant container orchestration platform: Kubernetes.

Kubernetes facilitates the management of these distributed applications, allowing you to scale dynamically both horizontally and vertically as needed. Containers bring consistency of management to different applications, simplifying operational and lifecycle tasks. By orchestrating containers, Kubernetes can operationalize the management of applications across ...