Kubernetes[1] already has a good reputation as an orchestration platform for containers and microservices, but one developer advocate is taking things a step further, observing that it make take the place of many application servers.
Managing all those containers. Photo: Joe McKendrick
Kubernetes and related projects, such as OpenShift[2] and Istio[3], "provide the non-functional requirements that used to be part of an application server," states Rafael Benevides, director of developer experience at Red Hat. He notes in a recent DZone post[4] that the combination of Kubernetes, OpenShift and Istio, which are not attached to any specific language, not only "encourage the use of the best technology/language for each use case," but provide a more rapid alternative to typical application servers that have come on the scene over the past two decades.
"The real benefits of containers happen when you need to add enterprise capabilities to your application," Benevides states. "And the best way to provide these capabilities to a containerized application is by using Kubernetes as a platform for them." Such capabilities include service discovery, basic invocation, elasticity, build and deployment pipelines, and monitoring.
There's still going to be a place for application servers in software development, which are "mutating into becoming more like frameworks," Benevides continues.
There are several reasons why Kubernetes is so popular at development shops, according to Ramon Guiu, VP of product management at New Relic. In a Q&A[5] posted at JAXenter, he notes that Kubernetes "was built for scale. The developer community readily turned to it because of the proven success of Google having used it for their own services at their massive scale."
The ability to