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As we know, students have limited computing
infrastructure. If you are using Kubernetes for
learning purpose, and you end up running 3 or
more VMs simultaneously, your system may not
remain in its best shape, which is not a happy day.
On the other hand, industries have much more
sophisticated infrastructure like servers, which
can hold large number of VMs. And even if they run
out of resources, they can always buy or rent more.
So, the solution should be simple, right?
If you are a student, use Cloud, if you are a
professional with industrial infrastructure,
use local installation. Well, it's not that simple.
Because there is a thing called hosted or managed Kubernetes as well.
It is provided by leading
public Cloud providers like GCP, AWS, or Azure,
and it gives all the facilities of Kubernetes
cluster without the pain of managing it.
So before deciding whether it is right solution for us or not,
let's look at its pros and cons.
It provides quick and limitless scaling very efficiently,
as seen in Pokemon Go case study.
But if your containers demand specific infrastructure, like
certain GPU or something like that, it may not be
available in your region. In which case, you may
have to resort to private infrastructure. You need
to hire less people to manage your cluster and
leave all the hassle to cloud providers.
But if the existing staff is unaware of this, or is not
skilled enough, they may have to do a minor skill uplifting.
Pay as you go and dynamic scaling
reduces the risk of unwanted infrastructure
investments. But carelessness like leaving unused
nodes open can bring tears to wallets.
High availability, Load balancing, and Monitoring are
mostly one click away due to Cloud services.
But you may have to go through an unavoidable
migration process, you can arguably get more
reliable performance with more security risks,
but again, both of these aspects are debatable.
So, for someone who doesn't want to scale their staff and
wants quick scale up with less risks, managed
Kubernetes might be the best choice. But for
someone who wants to keep their data absolutely
safe, and doesn't want to migrate private
infrastructure would be a better option.
But as always, for you as a student, learning managing
Kubernetes will definitely be a great asset and a skill.
So let's get started.