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).
With BuildPiper, Managing Kubernetes is no longer a pain now! Here’s how BuildPiper enables simple & hassle-free cluster management, Microservices management, product releases, and much more. Take a look now!
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.
Kubernetes usage appears to be a popular pattern being adopted by enterprises these days. Recently, 56 percent of the organizations that polled for the 2020 edition of The State of Enterprise Open Sourcereport, said that they expected their use of containers to increase in the next 12 months. The report polled 950 IT leaders.
Kubernetes has practically become the new norm for container orchestration. Enterprises going cloud-native consider Kubernetes as one of the important elements contributing to the success of implementing a cloud-first strategy. If you’re planning to re-architect your business architecture, I’m sure Kubernetes is the first thing that comes to your mind, isn’t it? Let’s take a look at other interesting Kubernetes facts.
According to a report by Statista, one-third of organizations surveyed by a source is using the container technology system- Kubernetes in some way among which, – 21% of the organizations are involved in researching Kubernetes -13% of the organizations are experimenting with Kubernetes -12% of the organizations are running Kubernetes in production -8% of the organizations are using Kubernetes for developing & testing
But with the increased adoption of Kubernetes, the need for choosing the best Kubernetes management platform to meet business requirements has become a major challenge for enterprises these days.
The blog highlights the benefits of Kubernetes and features that you should consider while choosing a Kubernetes management platform for enabling a smooth and effective Kubernetes adoption to drive productivity and business value.
Due to high traffic volume, initially, Tinder’s engineering team faced certain challenges of scale and stability. So, what did they do? In order to migrate 200 services, Tinder’s engineering team executed a Kubernetes cluster, with a total of 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers. That wasn’t an easy task at first, but once the team gained the knowledge and experience, they could easily containerize and deploy their applications on Kubernetes. Finally, they could easily migrate the services with higher scalability and stability.
Why do we need Kubernetes?
You can use Kubernetes to deploy your services, roll out new releases with zero downtime, and scale (or de-scale) those services. Listed below are five crucial business capabilities that Kubernetes can drive in an enterprise–no matter it’s large or small.
Faster time to market
IT cost optimization
Improved scalability and availability
Multi-cloud (and hybrid cloud) flexibility
Effective migration to the cloud
With the incredible benefits of Kubernetes, comes the huge challenge of choosing a Kubernetes management console that suits your business needs.
Features to Consider when choosing a Kubernetes Management Platform!
While you can choose various options to install and implement Kubernetes from scratch, many companies opt for a Kubernetes Management platform to make things easy. Here is how you can choose the right Kubernetes management solution and build the perfect Kubernetes management console for your enterprise.
Production Grade
Since configuring Kubernetes can be resource-intensive and time-consuming. Thus, a production-ready solution can help you overcome these configuration hassles for seamless cluster management. The solution should automate all management tasks within the cluster in order to speed up your production rate. It should support the creation of namespaces, ingress, config maps, and secrets with minimal complexity and maximum ease. Other important capabilities that make a platform, the best Kubernetes management platform include,
Removing a cluster
Updating the control plane and node computing
Maintaining and updating the nodes
Upgrading the Kubernetes API version
Securing the cluster
Upgrading the cluster
Multi/Hybrid Cloud
Kubernetes can be used anywhere so you can deploy to public/private/hybrid clouds, with greater availability and security. A Kubernetes management console should have the capabilities that can help to avoid tooling bursts, potential hazards with “vendor lock-in” and management overhead.
Check if the platform you’re choosing allows you to work with multiple cloud vendors, build a common infrastructure between clouds, cloud regions, and the data center. This allows apps to run in various environments without the need to adapt them. Simply put, the platform should enable smooth, simple, and quick cluster onboarding allowing users to onboard an existing cluster from any cloud or on-premise infrastructure.
Intuitive Manageability
Managing a production-grade Kubernetes cluster with complete security, scalability, observability, and reliability is quite taxing and challenging. With the right Kubernetes management platform in hand, things can be managed well. Ensure that the platform you choose has automated intelligent monitoring capabilities to provide you with the necessary details of early detection and intervention to prevent disasters.
Kubernetes platform must have built-in features such as self-healing and automated rollouts/rollbacks, for effective cluster management. Moreover, it should support schedulers that can monitor a cluster and perform actions whenever the actual state does not match the desired state. Schedulers are operators that continuously monitor the system and fix discrepancies between the desired and actual state.
A platform that supports easy integration and set-up of monitoring and log management tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Alert Manager, ElasticSearch Fluentd, and Kibana can prove to be a good choice. These tools help to collect information about the performance of containerized applications.
BuildPiper- The Best Kubernetes Management Platform for your Business!
The approach to Managed Kubernetes Delivery with BuildPiper goes beyond the initial setup and ease of manageability and is aimed at making Kubernetes —microservices application ready!Managed Kubernetes delivery is structured around 4 primary levers that club together to enable production-ready Microservices.
Setting up Secure, Scalable, Compliant, and cost-optimized K8s Cluster
Deep insights and observability
Configuration & Maintenance for Microservices ready K8s
Enhanced Production-Grade Microservice Tooling
For easy management of applications deployment on Kubernetes, BuildPiper makes use of Helm, which makes it the best Kubernetes management platform for your business. Helm is a tool that is used for managing Kubernetes’ packages called charts. Helm charts provide great help in defining, installing, and upgrading Kubernetes applications.
How can BuildPiper help?
BuildPiper helps in the complete management of your Microservices Application Delivery including Kubernetes. It provides application and infrastructure-centric views into the K8s clusters so that you can effectively manage, troubleshoot, and scale your environment.
Being a Kubernetes management console allowing DevOps teams to operate a dynamic environment at scale, BuildPiper helps to,
Achieve immediate and comprehensive visibility into all the cluster entities
Gain and monitor accurate performance and status data with deep insights
Integrate and set up infrastructure monitoring and log management tools with out-of-the-box product functionalities.
Enable further configuration of Kubernetes to make it ready for microservices consumption.
BuildPiper is the perfect Kubernetes management console that enables effective and hassle-free cluster management in combination with its other added functionalities of Managed Microservices, Secure CI/CD Pipelines, Security, Compliance, & Observability, and much more!
BuildPiper allows you to drive business value across microservices application delivery from Day 1 with a 10X reduction in time & investments needed and a shift left philosophy & NoOps mindset for multi/hybrid cloud. Talk to our experts NOW!
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.
