Kubernetes: A Game Changing Tool
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Kubernetes clusters can span hosts across on-premise, public, private, or hybrid clouds. For this reason, Kubernetes is an ideal platform for hosting cloud-native applications that require rapid scaling, like real-time data streaming through Apache Kafka.
How Industries are using Kubernetes:
Since its inception, Kubernetes has been a project that has enjoyed great recognition and has always had a lot of impact, but in recent months its influence has been consolidated based on different factors.
The community has grown considerably. Google and Red Hat are the biggest contributors, but there is also Meteor, CoreOS, Huawei, Mesosphere and many more.
In addition, Kubernetes is no longer perceived as something new to experiment with, it is gaining enough credit to be used more and more in production. In fact, by 2019, this platform was in production in 78% of the companies. One year earlier, in 2018, it was in 58%. Companies such as Tinder, Reddit, New York Times, Airbnb or Pinterest have integrated this technology into their services.
Companies are looking to develop applications, and containers and open source are becoming very important, as they realize that Kubernetes is the first step to create modern scalable applications.
Kubernetes is a system that can be used to efficiently implement applications. As a result, it can help companies save money by using less labor to manage their IT infrastructure.
Kubernetes offers these capabilities to a business:
- Multi-cloud flexibility: As more enterprises run on multi-cloud platforms, they benefit from Kubernetes, as it easily runs any application on any public cloud service or a combination of public and private clouds.
- IT cost optimization: Kubernetes can help a company reduce infrastructure costs quite dramatically if it is operating on a large scale.
- Improved scalability and availability: Kubernetes serves as a critical management system that can scale an application and its infrastructure whenever the workload increases, and reduce it as the load decreases.
- Effective migration to the cloud: Kubernetes can handle re-hosting, re-platforming and refactoring. It offers a seamless route to effectively move an application from the facility to the cloud.
KUBERNETES CASE STUDY: Spotify
Challenge:
Launched in 2008, the audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. “Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today — and hopefully the consumers we’ll have in the future,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations.
An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. By late 2017, it became clear that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,” he says.
Solution:
“We saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that,” says Chakrabarti. Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Plus, “we wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools.” At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence in the flourishing Kubernetes community.
The migration, which would happen in parallel with Helios running, could go smoothly because “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios,” says Chakrabarti.
Impact:
The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for a migration, which started late that year and is a big focus for 2019. “A small percentage of our fleet has been migrated to Kubernetes, and some of the things that we’ve heard from our internal teams are that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” says Chakrabarti.
The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from auto scaling, says Site Reliability Engineer James Wen. Plus, he adds, “Before, teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes.”
In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold.