How Kubernetes can reduce infrastructure costs for businesses

If we were to choose a single thing that permeates any kind of business in the world — from a small-time village fisherman to an international corporation — it would be cost woes. Every single decision, every move has to be weighed against its cost if the business aims to thrive, and for a modern operation the ever growing concern is the price associated with technological infrastructure.

Here, we’ll look over some ways Kubernetes will reduce this burden for you, rather drastically in places.

Use your hardware the most efficient way

Resource optimization is a critical aspect of managing applications and infrastructure efficiently, and Kubernetes provides robust capabilities in this regard. If you paid for the servers, and continue to pay for them to be online, you would like to squeeze all you can out of them. Same goes for cloud deployments: properly designed Kubernetes applications will thin out your AWS or Google Cloud bills.

At its core, Kubernetes allows businesses to define resource requirements for containers in a highly granular manner. By specifying CPU and memory limits for each container, businesses can effectively communicate the exact resources needed for their applications to operate optimally. This level of fine-grained control ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, without unnecessary waste or over-allocation. Kubernetes continuously monitors the resource utilization of containers and dynamically adjusts their placement and scaling to match the demand. This dynamic resource allocation capability ensures that applications receive the necessary resources while preventing underutilization and reducing the need for overprovisioning.

Another notable benefit of resource optimization in Kubernetes is the ability to leverage vertical scaling. Kubernetes allows businesses to dynamically adjust the CPU and memory limits for containers based on changing demands. This flexibility enables applications to scale vertically by utilizing more resources when needed and scaling down during periods of lower demand. By efficiently managing resource scaling, businesses can seamlessly transform their infrastructure to match the workload requirements precisely, ensuring optimal performance without incurring unnecessary costs.

Easily adapt to workload changes across all applications

It’s important for every technical system to be able to adapt to changes imposed by external factors. Kubernetes will allow you to quickly rearrange pieces of your larger product to respond to any sudden needs, such as an increase in database transactions or HTTP access, and automate it with no headaches.

This is what’s commonly called “horizontal scaling” (opposed to vertical scaling discussed previously). Horizontal scaling involves adding or removing replicas of an application to match the demand. Kubernetes accomplishes this through the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) feature. The HPA dynamically adjusts the number of replicas based on specified metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, or incoming request rates. This elasticity ensures that resources are provisioned as needed, allowing applications to handle varying workloads effectively.

Kubernetes also provides seamless load balancing capabilities, another vital aspect of scalability. As application replicas scale horizontally, Kubernetes distributes the traffic evenly across these replicas using a built-in load balancer. This load balancing ensures that each replica receives a fair share of requests, preventing any single replica from becoming overwhelmed. By distributing the workload efficiently, load balancing enhances application performance, prevents resource bottlenecks, and improves the overall scalability of the system.

And if that’s not enough, Kubernetes offers integration with external scaling solutions and cloud provider-specific scaling features. Businesses can leverage these capabilities to scale not only the application replicas but also the underlying infrastructure, such as virtual machines or cloud instances. This comprehensive approach to scaling allows businesses to scale their applications holistically, ensuring that both the application layer and the underlying infrastructure can handle increased demands seamlessly.

Make sure you are online 24/7

When every single service, or an application, consists of numerous little parts that work with each other in increasingly complex patterns, having them crash and bug out is nothing to be shocked by. Losing parts of your infrastructure can mean all kinds of bad things for your bottom line, and the longer it takes to return to status quo the more you are set to suffer.

Kubernetes provides automatic container health monitoring and recovery mechanisms. Kubernetes continuously monitors the state of containers and detects any failures or unhealthy conditions. When a container fails, Kubernetes automatically restarts it on a healthy node, ensuring that the application remains operational. This automatic recovery feature minimizes manual intervention and reduces the time it takes to recover from failures, enhancing service availability and reducing downtime.

There’s a concept of replica sets, which ensure that a specified number of identical replicas of an application are running at all times. If a replica becomes unavailable or fails, Kubernetes automatically spins up a new replica to replace it. This redundancy ensures that even in the event of a failure, there are always multiple instances of the application available to handle requests. This redundancy mechanism contributes to high availability by minimizing the impact of individual component failures.

In addition to replica sets, Kubernetes provides the concept of pod anti-affinity. This feature allows businesses to distribute replicas across different nodes in a cluster, ensuring that replicas of the same application are not colocated on the same physical or virtual machine. By spreading replicas across multiple nodes, Kubernetes avoids a single point of failure. If a node experiences a failure or becomes unavailable, the remaining replicas on other nodes continue to serve requests, preventing service disruptions and maintaining high availability.

Find out what’s actually going on

Before you fix something, you need to find that certain something that got broken somewhere. Without proper tools to support the investigation there might be no recovery at all. Kubernetes comes to help once again: its nature requires it to know everything about the workloads it runs, and there’s plenty of convenient ways for users to access this knowledge.

Kubernetes provides built-in monitoring features that allow businesses to collect and analyze various metrics and data points about the cluster, nodes, pods, and containers. Kubernetes exposes a wealth of metrics through its metrics API, which can be utilized by monitoring tools and systems to track resource utilization, network traffic, latency, error rates, and other performance indicators. This extensive monitoring capability enables businesses to gain insights into the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure.

If you’d rather integrate all of this into your pre-existing monitoring system, a wide range of monitoring solutions and frameworks, both open-source and commercial, are already supported. These monitoring tools can collect, aggregate, and visualize the metrics exposed by Kubernetes, providing businesses with real-time visibility into their systems. With the help of dashboards and alerts, businesses can proactively detect and respond to performance issues, bottlenecks, or anomalies, ensuring the optimal functioning of their applications.

Moreover, Kubernetes supports the concept of pod and container lifecycle events. These events provide valuable information about the state and transitions of pods and containers within the cluster. By monitoring these events, businesses can gain visibility into pod creation, deletion, scaling, et cetera. This visibility allows businesses to track the behavior of their applications and infrastructure, identify any issues or anomalies, and take appropriate actions in a timely manner.

Conclusion

Kubernetes is indeed an excellent choice for businesses aiming to reduce costs while ensuring a robust and scalable infrastructure. By leveraging Kubernetes' advanced features and capabilities, businesses can optimize resource utilization, automate routine tasks, and achieve high availability and fault tolerance, all of which contribute to significant cost savings.

Infrastructure is one of the most important things for a successful future when considering your business development. To be sure it doesn’t sink you in an unfortunate moment, and gives you room for a push when you are ready to make one, look at what Kubernetes can bring to the table.