In this episode, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with senior OCI instructor Mahendra Mehra, dive into the fundamentals of Kubernetes. They talk about how Kubernetes tackles challenges in deploying and managing microservices, and enhances software performance, flexibility, and availability. OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes Specialist: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oci-container-engine-for-kubernetes-specialist/134971/210836 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. -------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:26 Lois: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi everyone! We’ve spent the last two episodes getting familiar with containerization and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry. Today, it’s going to be all about Kubernetes. So if you've heard of Kubernetes but you don't know what it is, or you've been playing with Docker and containers and want to know how to take it to the next level, you’ll want to stay with us. Lois: That’s right, Niki. We’ll be chatting with Mahendra Mehra, a senior OCI instructor with Oracle University, about the challenges in containerized applications within a complex business setup and how Kubernetes facilitates container orchestration and improves its effectiveness, resulting in better software performance, flexibility, and availability. 01:20 Nikita: Hi Mahendra. To start, can you tell us when you would use Kubernetes? Mahendra: While deploying and managing microservices in a distributed environment, you may run into issues such as failures or container crashes. Issues such as scheduling containers to specific machines depending upon the configuration. You also might face issues while upgrading or rolling back the applications which you have containerized. Scaling up or scaling down containers across a set of machines can be troublesome. 01:50 Lois: And this is where Kubernetes helps automate the entire process? Mahendra: Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open source platform for managing containerized workloads and services that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. You can think of a Kubernetes as you would a conductor for an orchestra. Similar to how a conductor would say how many violins are needed, which one play first, and how loud they should play, Kubernetes would say, how many webserver front-end containers or back-end database containers are needed, what they serve, and how many resources are to be dedicated to each one. 02:27 Nikita: That’s so cool! So, how does Kubernetes work? Mahendra: In Kubernetes, there is a master node, and there are multiple worker nodes. Each worker node can handle multiple pods. Pods are just a bunch of containers clustered together as a working unit. If a worker node goes down, Kubernetes starts new pods on the functioning worker node. 02:47 Lois: So, the benefits of Kubernetes are… Mahendra: Kubernetes can containerize applications of any scale without any downtime. Kubernetes can self-heal containerized applications, making them resilient to unexpected failures. Kubernetes can autoscale containerized applications as for the workload and ensure optimal utilization of cloud resources. Kubernetes also greatly simplifies the process of deployment operations. With Kubernetes, however complex an operation is, it could be performed reliably by executing a couple of commands at the most. 03:19 Nikita: That’s great. Mahendra, can you tell us a bit about the architecture and main components of Kubernetes? Mahendra: The Kubernetes cluster has two main components. One is the control plane, and one is the data plane. The control plane hosts the components used to manage the Kubernetes cluster. And the data plane basically hosts all the worker nodes that can be virtual machines or physical machines. These worker nodes basically host pods which run one or more containers. The containers running within these pods are making use of Docker images, which are managed within the image registry. In case of OCI, it is the container registry. 03:54 Lois: Mahendra, you mentioned nodes and pods. What are nodes? Mahendra: It is the smallest unit of computing hardware within the Kubernetes. Its work is to encapsulate one or more applications as containers. A ...
