Helming my way to Kubernetes!!!

The empowerment that can be felt as we see the docker containers spin up, is no less than the might felt after winning a chess game. It is a concoction which cannot be extolled.

Having worked on Docker for more than two years now, I have perhaps felt far too comfortable at the ease that docker brings to the table. Especially with the Docker networking, Docker volumes and the ability to run anything inside a container has always felt very bolstering. It felt as if I was on the horizons where possibility and impossibility met. Docker made the possibility to run anything very real, and yet, it brought with itself an arduous and seemingly impossible task of managing these containers.

At one point in time as I advanced to develop a custom portal for “access” to Harbor, I found myself typing “ docker run -itd” and “docker build -t” far more than the number of lines of code I was writing. It felt impossible to manage the stateless microservices being run as containers on many many hosts. One fine day, I had a choice, to bake in everything as just one container or yield. But, yield? yield? to Docker? I resolved to step back and look at the bigger picture. It was evident, the time had come. It was now the time for me to set sailing in the direction towards Kubernetes.

Having been closely allied with THE most cutting edge technologies, and, yet daring not to venture “deep” into Kubernetes was somehow very belittling. Blame it on YAML! or the many many versions of Kubernetes and its many many variants. Maybe it was a problem with many many CRD’s or with the Kubernetes Objects, whatever be it, I was only scratching the surface for far too long. But no more!

My first deployment on Kubernetes felt bizarre, rather totally a blend of feelings which somehow didn’t sink in, not because of limitations in understanding of the concept, but, largely by the nomenclature involved. Soon, with no less than a few tweaks I was already able to expose a microservice with an Ingress controller. This pushed me to further try other possible “types” of Kubernetes Objects.

Eventually, as I became more and more familiar with Kubernetes Deployments, Statefulsets and Services — the feeling of being limited and intimidated by terminologies faded away. And I could now write “basic” YAMLS and pave my way to be “Cloud Native”. But as they say “Solutions create new problems”. Now I was no longer typing docker commands in CLI, but, now, I was creating, altering and maintaining YAMLS along with Docker images, Dockerfiles, application/business code and also typing more on CLI.

This ate away more time than I had previously thought and it tore me apart. On one side I was nearing automation of deployments with one command, and on the other hand, I also had to do all these arduous tasks MYSELF, for this was DevOps. I didn’t fear this challenge. I didn’t complain about the principle, but, rather, I swore to embrace it, however hard it was, I was convinced that I could do every bit of it. Not because I was lacking choices, but because I was/am immensely passionate about the whole.

As I geared up to write more and more YAMLS and everything, like a blessing, I found our “ HELM CHARTS”. It was “an Excalibur”, that magical sword I have been really in need of. Now, all I had to do, was to write Helm charts once and be able to alter values anytime! this possibility was truly limitless. But, what was more exciting was that for many many applications which were predominantly in prevalence — HELM charts were already there! all that anyone had to do was just use them!

As if this was now difficult, Bitnami’s Kubeapps does it in a click! how futuristic is that! How ecstatic would it feel to see your applications or application dependencies come up in a matter of minutes by just a few clicks and tweaks!

The levels of abstraction keep getting higher and higher each day, in a very good way! The journey from rock-solid Servers later to Virtualization from there to containerization and now, Kubernetization, overall is a tale that future will sing in all glory. We are all living and witnessing the future being made.

Thus, I have found myself far into the nativity of Cloud and Cloud-Native Architectures. From eschewing Kubernetes to espousing it, I have helmed my way to the wonderlands of Kubernetes and more! After all, we are the masters of our sails.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.