Discussed here are the top 5 Kubernetes management tools that help DevOps teams manage and deploy Kubernetes with ease. Let’s take a look!
Kubernetes is an open-source platform for scheduling and automating the deployment, management and scaling of containerized applications. Also known as “k8s” or “kube” — this container orchestration platform enables cost-effective cloud-native development. Along with all the advantages that come up with deploying Kubernetes, there are many management and monitoring challenges too. Engineering teams can be seen exploring ways to navigate through these complicated and often overwhelming Kubernetes management challenges to get the most out of their investments.
Kubernetes management involves all operations that deal with complete controlling and tracking of cluster metrics. Such tasks comprise the initiation, controlling, scaling and deletion of pods & containers, their configuration and the evaluation of cluster metrics. K8s management is not only concerned with performance-measured workloads. It also comprises maintenance of the supportive framework which covers the areas such as networking, storage and security. However, managing a Kubernetes cluster is rather complex because of the multi-layered architecture of Kubernetes and the dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments.
Today, most organizations are moving to Managed Services like EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services), and AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services), for easier handling of the Kubernetes Cluster. With Managed Kubernetes we do not have to take care of our Master Nodes, cloud providers will be responsible for all Master Nodes and Worker Nodes, freeing up our time. We just need to deploy our Microservices over the Worker nodes. You can pay extra to achieve an uptime of 99.95%. Node repair ensures that a cluster remains healthy and reduces the chances of possible downtime. This is good in many cases but it makes it an expensive ordeal as AKS costs $0.10 per cluster per hour. You have to install upgrades for the VPC CNI yourself and also, install Calico CNI. There is no IDE extension for developing EKS code. it also creates a dependency on the particular Cloud Provider.
To skip the dependency on any Cloud Provider we have to create a VanillaKubernetes Cluster. This means we have to take care of all the components – all the Master and Worker Nodes of the Cluster by ourselves.
Here we got a scenario in which one of our client’s requirements was to set up a Kubernetes cluster over On-premises Servers, under the condition of no Internet connectivity. So I choose to perform the setup of the Kubernetes Cluster via Kubespray.
Why Kubespray?
Kubespray is a composition of Ansible playbooks, inventory, provisioning tools, and domain knowledge for generic OS/Kubernetes clusters configuration management tasks. Kubespray provides a highly available cluster, composable (choice of the network plugin for instance), supports most popular Linux distributions, and continuous integration tests.
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!
