Overcome Kubernetes Complexity with Simplicity

Written by Jack Wallen | April 26, 2023

Remember the first time you learned something new? It might have been tech-related, artistic, car repair, or remodeling your home. There may be new skills to learn, complicated instructions to read, or an overwhelming number of steps to take. Those first steps can be daunting, especially when treading brand-new water.

For some, that complication can be enough to prevent them from even trying. Take one look at the list of steps, the tools required, or the incredibly tight spaces you have to work in, and you might find yourself hiring a specialist to take care of the situation, which is a viable, logical path to success. The same holds for technology. Your business should expand its platforms and deploy systems in ways to be more efficient and cost-effective. That new way of thinking might lead you to containerized deployments.

On the surface, containers are relatively straightforward. You use images to build use-specific containers and services and deploy them so employees, customers, and/or clients can access them. You can automate the scaling up of those containers to meet added demand and scale them down when demand is low to save money.

Who wouldn't want that?

But then, you (or your IT staff) start looking into what it takes to successfully containerize those applications and services and immediately realize how challenging it can be. However, using Docker to deploy an NGINX container to a Swarm cluster might seem simple. Or you are building a website with it that will automatically replicate to every node to ensure reliability and scalability. Beyond that, the complications can grow exponentially. When you venture into Kubernetes, the complications escalate even further, and you are working with the simpler of the two technologies.

However, the more you read about containerization, the more you realize that the sky's the limit to what you can do. With containers, you gain benefits such as:

Platform portability - your applications and services aren't limited to a single operating system or host.
Efficiency - you can better utilize compute, storage, and networking resources.
Agility - your developers will be able to create and deploy faster.
Better security - because you're isolating applications from one another and the host systems.
Speed - your applications will not only be able to run faster but can scale quicker (even automatically).
Ease of management - you'll have more control over installing, upgrading, and rolling back applications.

The benefits are considerable, to the point of outweighing the hurdles.

But what if you could overcome those hurdles such that your teams could pull off the impossible with a level of simplicity usually reserved for typical client-based applications? Imaging empowering your developers, admins, and DevOps teams with a tool that could make developing, deploying, and managing containers with the ease of point-and-click.

That's what Portainer can do for you.

Instead of your teams having to spend weeks or even months learning how to take care of very complicated tasks, they could employ a tool that will do much of the heavy lifting for them. That might sound like marketing hyperbole, but it's real.

With the help of Portainer, even your junior-level admins can take on the containerization of your applications and services with surprising ease. Instead of relegating those tasks to senior-level staff, anyone in your IT department could meet the challenge.

Multi-location ease

Let's consider another scenario, one that could become seemingly impossible. Say you have locations in multiple states or even countries, and you have to manage those containerized deployments from a single department or headquarters.

You could use the individual management dashboards if you're deploying to a third-party host such as AWS, Linode, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Now, imagine you use multiple third-party hosts. The multi-cloud trend continues as more organizations deploy from the providers mentioned above, and imagine the difficulty in managing a variety of third-party management dashboards.

How would you go about that?

How do you more efficiently manage those instances?

Portainer is the answer.

With Portainer, you can create multiple environments, ranging from locally deployed, remote, or any number of third-party hosts. Once you've added the necessary environments, Portainer's single, simple UI allows you to manage multiple environments as if they are one. And it doesn't matter if you're using Docker, Docker Swarm, or Kubernetes. Portainer has you covered.

Portainer strips away many of the complications from Docker and Kubernetes, enabling your business to use features that would otherwise confound IT staff.

In the end, if you're looking to do what might have otherwise seemed impossible, turn to Portainer to pull it off with ease.

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