Whales and boat helms
DevOps is all developers are talking about nowadays. Not really😂. But yeah, I do talk about it a lot. It’s absolutely miraculous how a bunch of a few scripts can handle all of the integration, deployment, testing, scaling, healing, and a gazillion other things. The first time I came across CI/CD pipelines, I just sat there thinking about all those hours in the dark I had spent manually configuring and deploy my applications on the cloud. Ughh, I won’t get that time back, but surely can make sure to use the technology available in its full swing in the future.
What does DevOps hold for non-tech executives, product/program owners/managers. Nothing really. But for those who work in close vicinity with technical scrum teams on a daily basis, it might become a bottleneck for them to not be able to understand or comprehend the meaning of technical terms. So, we’re gonna look at a few terms in DevOps from a bird’s view.
Let’s start off with docker. What is docker? Docker is a little cute blue-colored whale that somehow lost the way to his home and ended up being surrounded by developers.
Let us take an example. Say you are 10 years old again. That youthful little gal we all used to be. Old grandma visited you this summer and when she was leaving she gave you a pouch of nutty chocolate candies. Ummmm. You now have a dozen candies in your little hands, and they are spilling out over to the floor. The problem is within an hour your elder brother will be home and then nothing will stand between him and your candies. They will be all contents of his tummy by the time it’s midnight.
So, how do you protect your candies?
If you are smart like me, you will eat them before he gets home😂, but if you want to save them for later, then there is a need to search for some other way. You can store them? But if you store all of them in one place and he finds it, you are doomed.💀 What we will do is store each chocolate in a separate place. One in the upper cabinet in the almirah of the living room, one in your school bag, one in the freezer, one under your pillow, and so on.
Replace the drawers in the above examples with docker containers, and the candies with your application(database/UI/web app), and that is all you need to know about dockers. Dockers are used to create small containers, each container contains an application it will run and all these containers run separately from each other. If one of them fails, the other one is still safe. It helps developers run their applications in an isolated environment, away from the rest of the configuration of their system.
Note for non-tech executives: So, when a developer says that he is gonna containerize an application, all he means is that he is gonna put his app in a small box that is self-sustained and does not affect any configuration outside of that box.
What is Kubernetes then?
Let’s look at the official definition.
Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management.
Hmmm, Just so. I wonder if the inventor of Kubernetes still remembers this definition😒.
What it essentially means is this. Kubernetes is used to manage the containers we created in the first step. If our app has huge traffic coming in every day, Kube will scale up containers from 20 to 200, restart some containers if they fail, help manage passwords and secure data, and other things. Kubernetes is just a tool to manage containers. That is all. It is ofcourse more complicated if we get into its depths, but for non-tech execs, knowing this much is enough. If you are a tech geek, youtube tutorials are waiting eagerly for you.
Kubernetes has terms like clusters, pods, nodes, which can be explained like this.
Clusters are like a big house, nodes like rooms and pods like humans inside a room. So, clusters can deploy multiple nodes within them. They can help manage different environments, like cloud and physical machines. Nodes are workers that manage the processes. A pod is the smallest unit that is actually nothing but a program running a few computations.
Congratulations, you saved your candies and in the process, also learned a bit of problem-solving and the concept of distributed systems😁. So, you see, you have been using the concept of dockers since you were 10 years old.
Carrot Blogs
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