Container adoption is significantly increasing across various modern use cases, but it’s not a simple plug-and-play. Adopting containers becomes highly complicated, especially when it comes to executing them at scale as most enterprises have only limited skills and capabilities.
Many leading companies believe that Kubernetes is the first step to building scalable modern applications and they are adopting K8s to overcome container adoption barriers.
Spotify is one of these. Leveraging Kubernetes benefits, Spotify has observed significant cost-saving values as described in this case study. It has seen 2-3x CPU utilization by using the orchestration capabilities of K8s, resulting in better spend optimization.
For many of us, Kubernetes is the solution for some of the never-ending microservices application delivery problems, but Kubernetes setup and management comes with its own set of challenges. According to a report, there are 9 key Kubernetes challenges. In this blog, I’m focusing on the two primary challenges, which are Security & Networking.
Why is Security becoming such a Big Challenge for Organizations?
It’s mainly because Kubernetes is very complex and highly vulnerable if not monitored properly. As we implement Kubernetes for container orchestration, more and more containers are deployed and due to its distributed nature, hence it gets difficult to investigate which container might have vulnerabilities. Hence as a result the organization will start to feel the threat of outsiders breaching in.
One of the best examples of this situation: In 2018 Tesla’s Kubernetes admin console (which was not password protected) was breached by Hackers and mining of cryptocurrencies was done by Tesla’s cloud resources on amazon web services (AWS).
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Kubernetes is not a buzzword anymore. In fact, it has become one of those tech wonders that has been making all the technologists around the world super excited!
While Kubernetes is creating great excitement across the technology community, the bigger question is how can businesses and their great products derive value by adopting it!
Why is Managed Kubernetes in demand these days?
The underlying crucial components of a Kubernetes cluster setup and implementation are the management of clusters, nodes, and pods. Intuitive and seamless management of these components plays a significant role in simplifying the overall development and deployment process for a digital product.
Only simplifying the development task isn’t enough, there arises a need for an automated system to deploy, scale, monitor, and securely manage these containerized applications. And managing all this is not a cakewalk! Here’s how the Kubernetes cluster setup step by step can be made easy.
If how to setup kubernetes cluster has become a bottleneck and hinders hassle-free and fast delivery of your software product, then Managed Kubernetes is the ideal solution.
With simplified and flexible ‘Managed Kubernetes’, businesses can easily handle, scale, and deploy the Kubernetes cluster to scale their products, while doing away with the pain of handling the Kubernetes cluster set-up and operation of Kubernetes.
Explore and know more about the business benefits of Managed Kubernetes and why does your business need one! Read to know more!
There are multiple success stories out there that have leveraged a Kubernetes-based infrastructure to enable the scaling of business applications. Take Airbnb for instance; their transition from Monolithic architecture to Microservices had been much talked about.
The ultimate goal was to make continuous delivery available to hundreds of company’s engineers so that they could seamlessly add new services and enable the teams and ultimately the application to scale
The company adopted Kubernetes and Kubernetes components to manage the configuration and deployment of 250+ critical services to Kubernetes. The results were quite successful and allowed them to do over 500 deployments per day without any hiccups.
Containers have gained huge popularity in the business world due to their optimized performance and enablement of the speed of application delivery. They are rapidly being adopted by organizations both big and small.
With a 200% increase in Kubernetes adoption since the year 2017, it’s no doubt that Kubernetes is becoming the de-facto leader in container orchestration!
But with the increased demand for rapid growth and faster delivery in the competitive market space, there arises a need for an automated system to deploy, scale, monitor, and securely manage thousands of containerized applications.
A Kubernetes dashboard can help in deploying containerized applications to the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes offers an impressive set of features, including scalability, workload management, self-recovery, and progressive application deployment, but still, they require a significant manual configuration for better processing and controlled K8s cluster management processing and controlled K8s cluster management along with enhanced Kubernetes security.
Setting up an automated monitoring system that keeps a continuous check on Kubernetes components and its infrastructure is difficult. Managing all this can be taxing and challenging for the DevOps team already busy keeping up with multiple infrastructures and DevOps priorities.
Managed Kubernetes takes care of this and much more. With Managed Kubernetes, users can easily monitor and manage their Kubernetes cluster without having to set up and maintain it themselves.
Just like a Kubernetes Dashboard can help deploy containerized applications to a Kubernetes cluster, troubleshoot issues of containerized applications, and manage cluster resources, Managed Kubernetes can take care of the overall management of a complete Kubernetes cluster.
Once the cluster set-up is ready and operational, managed Kubernetes provide all the tools needed to automate routine processes such as updates, scaling, load-balancing, and monitoring within the cluster. It also ensures improved Kubernetes security that can be tracked through the Kubernetes dashboard.
In BuildPiper, we have created a microservices application delivery platform that allows seamless setup and management of Kubernetes as well!
BuildPiper allows multiple clusters to be managed by a consistent set of security and configuration policies enabling more compliance and lesser management costs. With BuildPiper, you can easily monitor the health status of the nodes, pods, and the complete node lifecycle management and keep an account of all Kubernetes security measures being taken within the system.
BuildPiper eases the task of the DevOps team as it frees them from the task of keeping a check on the implementation details of Kubernetes components and making sure that the cluster is healthy, secure, and up to date. With added functionalities like Managed Microservices, security, compliance, and observability, BuildPiper is the most suitable platform for deriving value from your microservices applications.
‘Monolith to Microservices’ is one of the most sought-after application modernization initiatives taken by various technology leaders today. Microservices is an architectural style and approach to writing software applications wherein the applications are broken down into smaller, independent components.
Enterprises worldwide are considering this approach along with other DevOps skills to quicken their delivery process and fasten their deployment rates. With major benefits being– increased resilience, rapid delivery, improved scalability, and faster time to market.
Microservice architecture helps companies to respond rapidly and meet the growing business needs. They help increase resilience, render a faster time-to-market, improve the agility of software teams, reduce costs, enhance scalability and provide the freedom of choosing any technology stack best suited for your application.
With pros, there are cons too. Like most transformational trends dwelling in the DevOps ecosystem, implementing microservices has its own challenges. Here are some of the major DevOps challenges faced while deploying microservices. Let’s read in detail about these challenges of DevOps.
Managing Microservices
With the increase in the number of microservices, managing them becomes more challenging. Execution and deployment of large and complex life cycles of Microservices require a well-automated system that can manage them well.
Thus, for better scaling and deployment of microservices, you must have a well-planned strategy in hand, adequate DevOps skills and a team with the right DevOps skillset. Without a proper implementation plan, managing Microservices can be cumbersome and excessively demanding for your organization.
CI/CD Pipeline Management
Although Microservices offer a plethora of advantages when it comes to development and deployment, they are many challenges of DevOps that you might face while deploying Microservices. Scalability is one such issue that most enterprises face while implementing Microservices.
Managing CI/CD pipelines were still easy in the past when businesses used monolithic applications. With the increase in the number of applications within an organization, pipeline maintenance became a bigger issue. Management of code repositories and CI/CD pipelines becomes much more complex and challenging as the number of applications increases.
Let’s say, for instance, a company might have to manage only 1–5 pipelines in the case of monolith applications. But the situation becomes complicated while managing and adopting microservices where the number of pipelines to be managed increases to 250 as each monolith is divided into ~50 microservices.
Monitoring
Unlike monolithic architecture, the traditional forms of monitoring will not align and fit well in a microservices environment. Since multiple services make up the entire functionality which was earlier supported with a single application, monitoring becomes a difficult task to manage.
When a problem arises in the application, detecting and identifying the root cause can be challenging. For instance, if you do not have a way of monitoring and tracking the path a specific request took. You would never be able to find out how many and which Microservices were traversed for a specific request coming from a user interface.
Businesses using Microservices often struggle to analyze the chain of communication across these services to identify where the issue originally arose. This can cause huge delays in detecting and identifying the main cause of the problem resulting in much higher mean time to resolve.
Along with these challenges of DevOps that enterprises have to face while deploying Microservices, there are other issues that can hinder business growth. These are a lack of appropriate DevOps skillset, non-availability of resources & funds, slow pace of development lifecycle, delayed release and many others. Among these issues, finding a team equipped with proficient DevOps skills is of utmost importance and should be a critical priority for businesses who wish to increase both: their value and growth.
Wrapping It All
Despite these challenges, Microservices have become quite popular in the industry today. With several features responsible for the trend, scalability is the most important one. Adoption of MicroServices by tech giants such as Amazon, NetFlix, eBay, and others, gives an assurance that this architectural style is here to stay.
Given our strong expertise and past experience working with 100+ customers on their Cloud & DevSecOps journey, we have created the most powerful Microservices App delivery platform — BuildPiper, that takes away all the challenges to deliver a new microservice and enable seamless Day 1 & 2 operations.
This platform takes care of everything that your team needs to overcome different challenges of DevOps related to Microservices and empowers it with appropriate DevOps skills and enables seamless delivery of dockerized code at reduced costs with a 10X faster time to market
BuildPiper supports seamless and highly intuitive Kubernetes cluster management, robust security, configuration management, Macro & micro CI-CD pipelines, observability, complete observability with a 360-degree view, and comprehensive Manageability with Automated Log Shipping, Secrets, Config Maps and Service Access Management, thus enabling smooth handling of Microservices with a secure product release through feature-rich delivery pipelines.
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Leverage BuildPiper and its features to empower your teams with the right DevOps skill set for better management of Microservices and much more!
