Kubernetes – something old, something new

At last year’s Bootcamp we had a great talk on containers by Surveer. As everyone knows NonStop can be run under at least two Virtual Machines but nothing has been announced about containers. Containers are the new method (post-Virtual Machine) for squeezing out efficiency from servers. Rather than create separate operating system environments as a hypervisor does, containers ‘contain’ everything they need to run within an environment (how much memory, processing, all configurations and versions required, etc.)  This has become extremely popular.

The popularity and number of containers used by companies has created a need for container orchestration. How do we manage and control all these containers running across many servers?  The current leader of the pack for orchestration is Kubernetes. You may see it abbreviated K8S – there are 8 letters between the K in Kubernetes and the S. If you have to write a lot about Kubernetes you come to love K8S. Keith Moore and I looked into K8S and discovered that its goals were availability, scalability and disaster recovery. Those features sounded vaguely familiar.

I started doing some YouTube learning on K8S and found that there were a lot of parallels between Pathway and Kubernetes.  Keith and I thought we’d do a little overview of Kubernetes at this year’s virtual NonStop TBC by comparing it to Pathway.  If you are at all interested in understanding Kubernetes at a high level join us in “Understanding Kubernetes through Pathway”

Justin Simonds

Master Technologist