Should You Learn Kubernetes in 2022

With the popularity of containerized applications reaching new heights in the past couple of years, the container orchestration platform Kubernetes has also shown widespread adoption across the industry. Thus Kubernetes has become a must-have in the toolset of any developer. However, since the inception of Kubernetes, the technological landscape has changed with new tools and technologies to simplify the Kubernetes experience. In this post, let’s decide if it is still worth learning Kubernetes in 2022.

Kubernetes in 2022

You need to learn Kubernetes if it is related to your work in any way, whether it’s creating containerized applications, managing and deploying, or maintaining a containerized environment. If you are a practitioner, there is a high likelihood that you will encounter K8s in some form or another. As K8s is becoming the de-facto standard with containers as the packaging format, K8s YAML manifests as config, and Helm combines all these things.

However, there is no need for learning Kubernetes, at least in-depth for some use cases. Day-to-day management of a Kubernetes cluster is a thing of the past with managed K8s offerings like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Those kinds of services offload all the management responsibility of the underlying resources to the service provider. Users only need to configure the bare necessities like cluster name, network config, and the number of nodes.

With the emergence of serverless services like Azure Container Instances, GCP Cloud Run enables users to completely forgo the need for Kubernetes and deploy and manage containers at scale via a fully managed serverless platform. Even Function as a service (FaaS) offerings like AWS Lambda now supports deploying containers as functions. Taking this a step further, no-code and low-code platforms like Cloudplex offer a seamless and straightforward experience for creating and managing the cluster and deploying and monitoring the containerized applications. This no-code and low-code offer capabilities to manage Kubernetes and integrate with other services like Knative, Istio, and Prometheus to offer a complete development platform.

What is Low-Code?

Low code can be considered the middle ground between traditional manual developments and complete no-code developments. Low-code platforms offer a collection of tools, components, and connectors with a graphical interface to build software while coding some aspects manually.

Low-code also enables developers to be more efficient and speed up the development. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for manually coding some aspects of the software and allows developers to focus more on the critical components.

Low-Code vs. No-Code

One cannot talk about low-code without considering No-Code. While low-code platforms offer some manual coding functionality, no-code platforms completely eliminate the need for any coding. No-Code platforms offer the simplest development experience across the board with a visual drag and drop experience for creating software.

However, this simplicity can also be a limitation. For instance, Not having any coding capabilities will limit no-code platforms to the functionality offered by the platform and make them ill-suited for scalable architectures and custom development needs. Meanwhile, low-code platforms can be utilized to facilitate scalable architectures and even API to easily extend or integrate with other platforms and services.

Low-code is the best option for modernizing legacy systems. It allows users to gradually modernize the application using reusable low-code components to build modern components like interfaces while still running the legacy services using custom code to interact with the legacy system. No-code is an excellent choice to create relatively simple applications, and even non-technical users can dip their toes into simple developments. However, if you need an extensible platform with custom coding capabilities while still offering a simple development experience, low-code offers the best of both worlds.

Low Code vs. Serverless

Low-Code focuses on providing a simple development experience, while serverless focuses on infrastructure. A serverless platform or service essentially eliminates the need for any infrastructure management. Cloud platforms eliminated the need for managing and maintaining hardware resources and provided access to early unlimited resources via the internet. Yet, users are still responsible for provisioning and managing these cloud resources.

Serverless takes this a step further by providing a platform to deploy code or containers without provisioning any infrastructure resources. The provider manages all underlying infrastructure. These serverless applications scale automatically to meet the application demands once deployed. The serverless platforms usually base their pricing on an on-demand structure where users are charged only for what they consume.

How Can Low-Code Help In Cost Savings?

The simpler and faster approach to development offered by low-code enables organizations to optimize the delivery pipeline and save costs. First, low-code reduces the development time with more pre-built reusable components. Thus, developers can focus on building core and custom functionality without being bogged down in simpler tasks. When this is combined with a serverless platform, cost savings can be achieved across both development and deployment workloads.

Additionally, low-code platforms reduce the barrier to entering complex platforms like K8s, minimizing the need for specialists of these platforms. They also enable organizations to tap into a larger talent pool that can be easily trained on these low-code platforms.

How Low Code Can Help In Accelerating Innovation And Digital Transformation

Integrating low-code as a part of the delivery pipeline helps organizations create more agile and faster development environments focusing on delivering the best product. The cost and time savings offered by low-code can be invested into other areas such as experimental features and additional testing to benefit the development. It leads to faster time to market with new features and fixes and allows organizations to gain an edge over the competition.

Due to the low barrier to entering low-code platforms, users other than developers or Ops personnel can also leverage these platforms for their developments. Think of a data team that might not have that much software development experience. They can use a low-code platform to create simple applications that suit their needs without actual developer involvement.

What Are “The Human” Advantages Of Adopting Low Code In Enterprise?

The simplified development experience offered by low-code allows smaller teams to tackle a larger workload without getting overwhelmed. It also enables organizations to create diverse teams with specialties in many areas without the need for multiple engineers to tackle the same workload. Moreover, the reduced workload by low-code platforms, in turn, leads to more efficient and stress-free environments, significantly improving the productivity of the team.

Conclusion

Kubernetes is still the market leader in container orchestration, and it is worth learning if you are engrossed in the platform. However, low-code and no-code platforms like Cloudplex have challenged the need to learn Kubernetes in depth by offering simpler yet fully-featured platforms to manage and maintain K8s as well as the development and deployment of containers.

Asad Faizi

Founder CEO

CloudPlex.io, Inc

[email protected]