Kubernetes: An Introduction to the Open Source Container Orchestration Platform

Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes is now an open-source platform that is used for managing applications deployed as containers across multiple hosts - now hosted under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It provides features for automating deployment, scaling, and maintaining these applications. Hosts are organised into clusters, and applications are deployed into these clusters as containers. Kubernetes is compatible with several container engines, notably Docker. The popularity of Kubernetes continues to increase as a result of the feature-rich tooling when compared to use of a container-engine alone, and a number of Cloud-based hosted solutions are now available, such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, and IBM Cloud Container Service.

This talk will provide an introduction to the Kubernetes platform, and a detailed view of the platform architecture from both the Control Plane and Worker-node perspectives. A walk-through demonstration will also be provided. Furthermore, two additional tools that support Kubernetes will be presented and demonstrated - Helm: a package manager solution which enables easy deployment of pre-built Kubernetes software using Helm Charts, and Istio: a platform in development that aims to simplify the management of micro-services deployed on the Kubernetes platform.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Michael J. O'Sullivan is a Software Engineer working as part of the Cloud Foundation Services team for IBM Cloud Dedicated, in the IBM Cloud division in Cork. Michael has worked on both Delivery Pipeline/Deployment Automation and Performance Testing teams, which has resulted in daily exposure to customer deployments of IBM Cloud services such as the IBM Cloud Containers Service, and the IBM Cloud Logging and Metrics Services. Michael has also worked on deployment of these services to OpenStack and VMware platforms. Michael holds a PhD in Computer Science from University College Cork (2012 - 2015), where, under the supervision of Dr. Dan Grigoras, engaged in research of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) - specifically, studying and implementing solutions for delivering seamless user experiences of MCC applications and services. Prior to this, Michael graduated with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Computer Science from University College Cork in 2012.