Kubernetes at Scale on the Public Cloud

Today, enterprises need to be agile in order to boost innovation, improve customer service, and keep up with the fast-changing business environment. As they strive to improve organizational agility, they are adopting microservices-based, cloud-native, containerized apps more and more.

Many small and large companies faced issues such as downtime, container mismanagement, and low input/output capability, which led to the success of the fastest-growing orchestration tool, Kubernetes.

But what made 70% of IT leaders diverge their attention to this technology?

Let’s find out.

Kubernetes (also known as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration tool that automatically deploys, manages, and scales containerized applications. To put it another way, it is a platform that offers a collection of standards so that you can run programs and ensure that they can handle a variety of traffic.

2000+ businesses use Kubernetes in their production software stacks. These include well-known companies like Reddit, Slack, Airbnb, Tinder, Ancestry, IBM, Bose, CapitalOne, Philips, Intuit, Nordstrom, Spotify, and many more.

Gartner Inc. predicts that global container management revenue will expand rapidly from a low base of $465.8 million in 2020 to $944 million in 2024. The two subsegments that will grow the fastest are public cloud container orchestration and serverless container solutions, emphasizing the need to focus on Kubernetes-as-a-Service(KaaS).

KaaS: Kubernetes as a Service at a Glance

With KaaS, Kubernetes, the world’s most widely used container orchestrator, can be leveraged as a managed service.

Deploying, monitoring, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters are the core duties of a KaaS platform. Along with the advantages such as self-service deployment, upgrades, scalability, and multi-cloud portability, below mentioned are the five main benefits of KaaS:

1. Load Balancing: Aids in service discovery by exposing the pods to the network service, load balancing, and traffic distribution between containers using DNS.
2. Storage Orchestration: Takes care of container storage setup and management and ensures data persistence beyond the pod’s lifetime and efficient container deployment.
3. Automated Rollouts and Rollbacks: These tools make it easier to deploy software by minimizing downtime and facilitating quick rollbacks when necessary.
4. Automatic Bin Packing: K8s assists you in organizing your containers onto specific hosts to ensure the least resource wastage by setting a container’s CPU and memory requirements.
5. Self-Healing: Offers the ability to automatically assess the application’s health, restart troubled containers, or eliminate problematic containers.

Also Read: Block Storage vs Object Storage

The Building Blocks of Kubernetes Architecture

The Kubernetes architecture, also known as the Kubernetes application deployment architecture allows application containers to be constructed, deployed, scaled, and managed across host clusters.

Cluster nodes, a distributed key-value store system for ensuring the consistency of the cluster state (etcd), and the Kubernetes control plane are the fundamental components of an environment running Kubernetes (Kubelets, also called worker nodes or minions). A Kubernetes cluster is depicted in the graphic below:

Fig.1. Kubernetes Architecture
Image Courtesy: AviNetworks

Challenges of Operating Kubernetes In-House

Kubernetes presents difficulty in setting up configurations and only gets more challenging as you go. That’s presumably why most businesses look for ‘enterprise-ready’ Kubernetes solutions, except for multinational IT companies like Google, Netflix, Facebook, etc.

This might be because internal cloud-native architecture requires a dedicated team of professionals for its maintenance. However, before implementing it, a company must take into account the following factors:

• Teaching technical teams Kubernetes while taking into account a difficult learning curve
• Installation and upgrade
• Scalability and cluster configuration management
• Configuring a secure system
• Reliable container launch from any location
• Increasing security by creating a certain level of isolation
• Containers may be launched, built, and cloned in seconds.

How to Build Smarter and Deploy Faster with Kubernetes?

Organizations can benefit from Kubernetes’ best features by using the service rather than having to cope with the difficulties of running the cluster. KaaS assists the user with several activities, such as setting up Kubernetes and any necessary CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and managing the operation, guaranteeing high availability, and issuing changes as necessary.

Four primary features of KaaS are:

1. Centralized Management: KaaS provides better visibility, network configuration management, and security to all the clusters of Kubernetes architecture. It provides administrators with the ease of managing everything from a single interface.
2. Faster Deployments: KaaS providers deploy, administer, and maintain the whole Kubernetes infrastructure, resulting in decreased overhead and higher productivity. With this, developers can focus on the development process instead of managing the infrastructure.
3. Data Security: KaaS provides built-in control and security standards to prevent data breaches. It assists you in establishing the finest data security strategies across enterprises using policy-based user management, permission management, and accessibility controls.
4. Effortless Scalability: Kaas enables engineers to deploy containerized applications with seamless scalability. Automated deployment, fault tolerance, and load balancing are some of the other significant benefits of KaaS.

Workflows Reaping the Benefits of KaaS

CI/CD Pipeline

Between the time code is first developed and the time it is released in production, numerous processes are automated using CI/CD. Similarly, Kubernetes automates container deployments across various infrastructure setups, assures effective resource utilization, boosts development speed, optimizes software quality, and maintains operability.

The image below gives a fair example of a CI/CD pipeline with Kubernetes.

Fig.2. CI/CD Pipeline with Kubernetes example

Serverless Efficient Computing

A cloud-native approach known as serverless computing is one in which the development process is abstracted from backend server-related services. Developers create and containerize the program while cloud providers manage server provisioning and maintenance.

All significant cloud service providers provide serverless models. However, Kubernetes enables the development of a standalone serverless platform that offers more control over the backend operations.

Developers may concentrate on the product while maintaining control over the infrastructure by setting up a Kubernetes-driven serverless environment.

Microservices Management

Microservice architecture is used by most applications today to streamline and accelerate code management. Microservices are services with distinct capabilities that can talk to one another within larger apps.

For developers who choose to use this architecture, microservice-to-microservice communication techniques constitute one of the more prevalent obstacles.

When it comes to controlling communication between application components and managing component behavior in the event of a failure, Kubernetes is the best.

Scalable App Deployments

Kubernetes is made to handle huge applications thanks to its automation capabilities and declarative configuration method. Load balancing and features like horizontal pod scalability enable developers to build up the system with minimal downtime.

When unforeseeable events like traffic spikes and hardware malfunctions occur over an app’s lifetime, Kubernetes ensures that everything remains operational.

Effectively controlling the environment, including IPs, networks, and resources, is one of the difficulties experienced by developers of large-scale apps, happily addressed by Kubernetes.

Also Read: What is Public Cloud

Top Reasons to Use Kubernetes in the Public Cloud

Kubernetes allows you to execute your containerized applications anywhere without changing your operational tooling. You can leverage various open-source projects and vendors’ Kubernetes-compatible tools to enhance and expand your application architecture.

Additionally, manage their lifecycles and scale them to the state you desire in an extensible way. The following are the four key benefits of using Kubernetes with the cloud:

1. Highly available Control Plane: It aids in the elimination of single points of failure in clusters and the efficient operation of workloads. The control plane instantly spins up clusters and scales in response to an increase in API load.
2. Easily Scalable Containers: It helps you to deploy complex containerized applications across multiple clusters or even across a cluster of servers. Add more instances of your application services as necessary to meet the demand.
3. Simplified Operations: With continuous backup, migration, and monitoring, automated Kubernetes cluster deployment will lower your operational overhead.
4. Improved Availability & Resilience: With proactive failure detection and live migration, you can improve storage availability in your Kubernetes clusters and control plane.

Level up your business — Experience KaaS with Ace

As more businesses consider utilizing the potential of public clouds, they must make many crucial choices. For instance, they must choose which cloud and technologies to employ and how to manage resources and install apps.

If you’ve spent a lot of time, money, and effort developing software, shouldn’t you be able to deploy and manage it easily?

How can your program be scaled to satisfy user demand?

Do you intend to employ your software in the best potential ways?

We can be the solution to all your queries. With recent innovations and advancements on Ace, you can securely deploy applications at scale using an open-source cloud model. Ace allows you to focus on writing applications, making deploying, managing, and operating them easier.

While we take care of the underlying infrastructure and operational concerns, you can focus on adding business value.