Container Storage and Data Protection for Applications on Kubernetes

Chapter 5. Moving to Kubernetes

In today’s world, consumers and business customers alike demand increasing speed. Complex, modern applications must deliver better results more quickly in areas like personalization, artificial intelligence, and fraud detection across verticals. Centrally managed and human-operated applications are a drain on struggling IT teams and provide diminishing returns; traditional application architecture can’t keep up with today’s huge data volume, global deployment, and demand for horizontal scale.

PaaS and SaaS are paradigms that work best when they are elastic, scaling up and down to meet unpredictable demand. Unlike traditional monolithic on-premises applications, PaaS and SaaS must scale horizontally, adding physical or virtual resources immediately when needed. Because adding physical on-premises servers is often a slow process with a long lead time, this means that modern applications must be able to run anywhere: in on-premises environments, in cloud environments, or in hybrid environments that consist of a combination of the two.

The answer that has emerged is to break up applications into microservices running in containers. This introduces complexity beyond what IT teams can be asked to manage manually, necessitating automated management, provisioning, load balancing, and fault resolution. These requirements are essentially the feature list of Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a platform that orchestrates collections of containers in a variety of ...