What architects need to know about Kubernetes and containers in 2023

In 2022, containers were ubiquitous, forming the foundation for scheduling workloads across industries. For something as basic as a way to wrangle Linux namespaces, we've come a long way in orchestrating them with Kubernetes. We've all found uses for containerization to enable hyperscale and performance and to add as many 9's as possible for our ops teams (while hopefully not paging them at midnight during a New Year's celebration as we ring in 2023!). With these kinds of capabilities, the industry at large has been paying attention.

[ Read Kubernetes: Everything you need to know. ]

As you plan for 2023, look back at the top Enable Architect articles about Kubernetes, OpenShift, and other container topics from 2022.

Top 10 containers articles of 2022

As we continue to cross the bridge into cloud-native containerized applications, virtualization in containers is paramount to running our legacy workloads. Fatih Nar and Rimma Iontel guide us on how we can balance virtual machine traffic with Kubernetes services, helping us assure availability to our containerized virtual machines, improve uptime to our most essential workloads, and scale those services.

Nothing brings together your services quite like a service mesh for your containerized applications. In our article about improving container observability with a service mesh, Fatih Nar, Vikas Grover, and I help you optimize your service mesh for network-centric workloads and provide a gap analysis and a path forward.

Don't stop there, though! Fatih and I cover different approaches to init containers in Istio CNI to help you tune your service mesh to fit your containerization needs.

It's no secret that containers and DevOps are like peas in a pod (we all love reproducibility and congruency between our dev, staging, and production environments). If you're looking to use containers to improve your CI/CD story, check out how to use Tekton to set up a CI pipeline with OpenShift Pipelines by Dapo Oloyede and Olu Oteniya for a truly container-centric approach to CI.

If your environment hosts several (or more) tenants, you can leverage hierarchical Kubernetes namespaces for multiple tenants. Bob Reselman will help get you there with a squeaky-clean methodology for keeping all the tenant environments so clean they'll always pass a white-glove test.

When it's time to get your computational horsepower and data stores closer to your customers on the edge, Rimma Iontel and Fatih Nar have you covered with several Kubernetes deployment models for edge applications.

And for 5G edge situations, dig into Eric Lajoie, Steven Lee, and Fatih Nar's article about how to architect distributed scalable 5G with observability, because visibility leads to more 9's and more zzz's, so your ops teams can sleep easily.

Speaking of 5G, telcos continue ramping up containerization efforts, and we're already looking into what that looks like in 2023 and beyond. Fatih Nar, Yasar Koc, and Ahmet Emre Yılmaz share their 5G/6G-ready business support system for telco operators.

Anca Pavel, Fatih Nar, Federico Rossi, and Mathias Bogebrant share their design for a 5G Core platform that scales well. It incorporates Kubernetes, service meshes, and even container-native functions (CNFs) that scale based on user demand.

Oh wait, you still haven't squeezed every last drop of scale out of your telco, media, and entertainment (TME) Kubernetes platforms? Fatih Nar and Brandon Jozsa are ready to show you how to use cloud hyperscalers to handle 5G traffic demand bursts, including the business considerations to get your return on investment and comply with complex regulatory concerns.

[ eBook: Developing and deploying containers using Red Hat & AWS solutions ]

Wrapping up

Do you have knowledge to share about containers, Kubernetes, or OpenShift in enterprise architecture? If so, consider writing about it for Enable Architect. Join our community and share your insight to help others on their architecture journey.

And if you want more about containers, check the list below for some of the other articles Enable Architect published in 2022!