What is Self-healing

Sometimes when you deploy your workloads, one of the services or pieces of software that makes up your workload can experience issues and stop working. In many of these cases the software is terminated and stopped entirely, especially if the virtual or physical machine running the software has a hardware failure or runs out of memory. This kind of failure can disrupt your workload and cause downtime for you and your users.

When you deploy your workload with Kubernetes, you can tell Kubernetes how to handle these kinds of situations. Kubernetes can automatically recreate failed services on the same or different hardware if there is an issue within you Kubernetes cluster. Your workloads can heal themselves and return to good working service without the intervention of an administrator. This is great for avoiding downtime or disruptions in the service you provide.

How Does Automated Scaling and Deployment Work

When you experience a sudden surge of traffic or activity, your deployed workload may begin to suffer poor performance if it is not able to process all of the activity quickly enough. This kind of situation can eventually lead to your workload becoming overloaded and failing, resulting in an outage.

You can configure Kubernetes to respond to changes in activity or demands on your workloads by creating or deleting instances of the applications that power your workloads. This is great for automatically responding to temporary spikes in usage and for avoiding paying for unused resources during periods of low activity.

What Is High Availability

High availability means that the Kubernetes cluster is capable of withstanding the loss of critical components without suffering a disruption to your workloads’ ability to continue working. In the event of failure, Kubernetes can recreate your workload’s applications on parts of the Kubernetes cluster that are still working as expected. Without a highly available configuration, any failure of a single critical component could mean the loss of the entire Kubernetes cluster and significant downtime for your workloads.

Advanced Management

Kubernetes provides a standard API (application programming interface) that cloud users can use to deploy and manage workloads on Kubernetes regardless of who your Kubernetes provider is. Kubernetes will generally function the same from one provider to another, but differences in the version of Kubernetes a provider supports may mean some features are or are not available.

The Kubernetes ecosystem also has several tools for deploying containers on Kubernetes, testing Kubernetes, deploying Kubernetes, monitoring Kubernetes, and managing Kubernetes clusters. Some of the biggest names currently in the Kubernetes space include but are not limited to Helm, Rancher, Kubespray, OpenShift, K3s, K0s, and Prometheus.

Kubernetes Is Exciting, but Also Complex

Kubernetes currently enjoys a good deal of excitement and adoption, especially among enterprise cloud users. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsors the development and support of Kubernetes and several other projects that complement Kubernetes. Most major public cloud providers offer Kubernetes-as-a-Service for teams who want to use Kubernetes but do not want to manage their own Kubernetes clusters.

Kubernetes is a relatively complex solution to run and administer on your own. That is to not say you cannot do it - the public cloud providers do it after all! Teams who are interested in adopting Kubernetes must be sure that their workloads are well-suited to benefiting from Kubernetes and, if they want to host their own Kubernetes cluster, that they have the resources and time to dedicate to building up experience as Kubernetes administrators and architects.

Kubernetes is an extremely powerful tool for enabling cloud-ready teams to deploy their workloads more quickly and to meet the demands of their users’; however, too many teams try to adopt Kubernetes and fail to see any benefits because they or their applications were not ready yet to benefit from Kubernetes.