Most of the information below applies to any type of Kubernetes environment. However, to ground the discussion, we’ll reference  IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) where relevant — to explain how the tools and practices we discuss can apply to a real-world production Kubernetes service.

What Is Kubernetes?

If you’re reading this article about Kubernetes logging, you probably already know what Kubernetes is. However, it’s worth briefly spelling out what it does, because understanding what Kubernetes can and can’t do is the first step in extending your logging strategy to support it.

Kubernetes offers several key types of functionality:

• Application hosting: Kubernetes’s first and foremost feature is hosting applications. Typically, those applications are hosted in containers, although it’s possible to run other types of workloads (such as virtual machines) with Kubernetes.
• Load balancing: Kubernetes automatically distributes traffic between different application instances to optimize performance and availability.
• Storage management: Kubernetes can manage access to storage pools that applications use to store stateful data.
• Self-healing: When something goes wrong, such as an application failure, Kubernetes attempts to fix it automatically. It doesn’t always succeed, however, which is one reason why Kubernetes logging is so important.

Kubernetes does other things too, but these are the core areas of functionality it offers.

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