In the first two articles in this series about using serverless on an open source platform, I described how to get started with serverless platforms and how to write functions in popular languages and build components using containers on Apache OpenWhisk.

Here in the third article, I’ll walk you through enabling serverless in your Kubernetes environment. Kubernetes is the most popular platform to manage serverless workloads and microservice application containers and uses a finely grained deployment model to process workloads more quickly and easily.

Keep in mind that serverless not only helps you reduce infrastructure management while utilizing a consumption model for actual service use but also provides many capabilities of what the cloud platform serves. There are many serverless or FaaS (Function as a Service) platforms, but Kuberenetes is the first-class citizen for building a serverless platform because there are more than 13 serverless or FaaS open source projects based on Kubernetes.

However, Kubernetes won’t allow you to build, serve, and manage app containers for your serverless workloads in a native way. For example, if you want to build a CI/CD pipeline on Kubernetes to build, test, and deploy cloud-native apps from source code, you need to use your Continue reading

Kubernetes is the de facto open source container orchestration tool for enterprises. It provides application deployment, scaling, container management, and other capabilities, and it enables enterprises to optimize hardware resource utilization and increase production uptime through fault-tolerant functionality at speed. The project was initially developed by Google, which donated the project to the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation. In 2018, it became the first CNCF project to graduate.

This is all well and good, but it doesn’t explain why development and operations should invest their valuable time and effort in Kubernetes. The reason Kubernetes is so useful is that it helps dev and ops quickly solve the problems they struggle with every day.

Following are five ways Kubernetes’ capabilities help dev and ops professionals address their most common problems.

1. Vendor-agnostic

Many public cloud providers not only serve managed Kubernetes services but also lots of cloud products built on top of those services for on-premises application container orchestration. Being vendor-agnostic enables operators to design, build, and manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms easily and safely without risk of vendor lock-in. Kubernetes also eliminates the ops team’s worries about a complex multi/hybrid cloud strategy.

2. Service discovery

To develop microservices applications, Java developers must Continue reading