Revolutionizing Industries with Kubernetes: A Case Study
Overview
Kubernetes (also known as k8s or “kube”) is an open source container orchestration platform that automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications.
What are Kubernetes clusters?
You can cluster together groups of hosts running Linux® containers, and Kubernetes helps you easily and efficiently manage those clusters.
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
Main Advantages:
1. Kubernetes has Multi-cloud Capability
The other great thing about using Kubernetes is that you can finally ditch the conventions and benefit from the multi-cloud capability. You can keep your workloads in a single cloud or spread them across different cloud platforms. As a result, you can make your infrastructure more resilient. And, as a bonus, you can take advantage of the best services each cloud platform has to offer, maybe also lowering your overall costs.
2. It’s now easier than ever to roll out new software versions
People and the market constantly evolve, and the same goes for their needs and expectations. Businesses must make all necessary efforts to stand out and meet all their customers’ needs and expectations. Kubernetes allows you to roll out updates easily and efficiently. This way, you can quickly give customers the new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes they require.
3.Kubernetes Is Open Source And Free
Kubernetes is free and open source software that operates with the support of an extensive community. This means you are free to use Kubernetes however you want. You don’t need to pay for a software license, and you can even edit Kubernetes’ code to better fit your needs.
CNCF is responsible for overseeing the platform and ensuring everything works without any disruption. The platform benefits from a number of corporate sponsors, but nobody owns the platform.
4. Kubernetes Has Benefits of Cloud Native Management Tools For Free
Cloud-native management has been introduced in the tech world keeping in mind the growing inclination of users on digital solutions and automation.
So, one of the most significant advantages of using Kubernetes is that it gives you access to the perks of cloud-native management tools. Being an open-source platform, these perks can be obtained for free.
5. Access To Self-Healing Systems
Kubernetes doesn’t only start thousands of containers after we send it certain instructions. It also makes sure that the desired state is preserved at all times. And it’s very smart at doing that. If a container breaks down, it can recreate one that works. If a server breaks down, it can detect that and recreate the containers that were lost, on a new, working server.
KUBERNETES COMPONENTS & ARCHITECTURE
- The Kubernetes API server validates and configures data for the api objects which include pods, services, replicationcontrollers, and others. The API Server services REST operations and provides the frontend to the cluster’s shared state through which all other components interact
2. The Scheduler schedules Pods across multiple nodes based on the information it receives from etcd, via the API Server.
3. The Kubernetes controller manager is a daemon that embeds the core control loops shipped with Kubernetes. In applications of robotics and automation, a control loop is a non-terminating loop that regulates the state of the system
4.etcd is an open source distributed key-value store used to hold and manage the critical information that distributed systems need to keep running. Most notably, it manages the configuration data, state data, and metadata for Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration platform.
5.The Kubernetes command-line tool, kubectl, allows you to run commands against Kubernetes clusters
6.A Kubernetes cluster consists of the components that are a part of the control plane and a set of machines called nodes.
7.The worker nodes are responsible for running the containers and doing any work assigned to them by the master node. The master node looks after: scheduling and scaling applications. maintaining the state of the cluster.
- Development: Kubernetes can be used to create and manage development environments, such as Docker images and Kubernetes manifests. This can help to ensure that developers have a consistent environment to work in, and that their applications are always up-to-date.
- Deployment: Kubernetes can be used to deploy applications to production. This can be done in a variety of ways, such as rolling updates, blue/green deployments, and canary deployments.
- Scaling: Kubernetes can be used to scale applications up or down based on demand. This can help to ensure that applications are always running at the optimal capacity, without wasting resources.
- Management: Kubernetes can be used to manage applications in production. This includes tasks such as monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting.
- Retirement: Kubernetes can be used to retire applications. This can be done by deleting Kubernetes objects, such as pods, deployments, and services.
🚀INDUSTRY USE CASES STUDY 💡
🚗Case study: Mercedes-Benz
Challenge📉
Mercedes-Benz is one of the most successful automotive companies in the world. As a 100% subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH creates digital products and software solutions in collaboration with Mercedes-Benz. Kubernetes is a crucial element of our technology stack and we have relied on it since version v0.9. However, since there was no existing Kubernetes fleet management solution available at the time of our adoption, we had to create our own solution.
Solution💹
After researching our options, we decided to migrate to Cluster API, a Kubernetes project that provides a declarative API for provisioning and managing Kubernetes clusters. Cluster API allows us to manage our clusters using Kubernetes itself. It provides a more consistent experience for our team of 30 developers and platform engineers, as it reduces the number of necessary frameworks and tools to get the job done.
Impact💡
Adopting Cluster API has been transformational for our Kubernetes platform. We have been able to eliminate snowflakes, reduce deployment time, perform rolling upgrades, onboard new clouds faster, standardize our infrastructure, and leverage the power of open source.
🤖Case study: OpenAI
Challenge📉
An artificial intelligence research lab, OpenAI needed infrastructure for deep learning that would allow experiments to be run either in the cloud or in its own data center, and to easily scale. Portability, speed, and cost were the main drivers.
Solution💹
OpenAI began running Kubernetes on top of AWS in 2016, and in early 2017 migrated to Azure. The lab runs key experiments in fields including robotics and gaming both in Azure and in its own data centers, depending on which cluster has free capacity. “We use Kubernetes mainly as a batch scheduling system and rely on our autoscaler to dynamically scale up and down our cluster,” says Christopher Berner, Head of Infrastructure. “This lets us significantly reduce costs for idle nodes, while still providing low latency and rapid iteration.”
Impact💡
“Because Kubernetes provides a consistent API, we can move our research experiments very easily between clusters,” says Berner. Being able to use its own data centers when appropriate is “lowering costs and providing us access to hardware that we wouldn’t necessarily have access to in the cloud,” he adds. “As long as the utilization is high, the costs are much lower there.” Experiments can get up and running in two or three days, and scaled out in a week or two; before, that would have taken a couple of months.
Case study: Zalando
Challenge💹
With plans to further expand its original e-commerce site to include new services and products, Zalando embarked on a radical transformation in 2015, resulting in autonomous self-organizing teams. The technology department began rewriting its applications to be cloud-ready and moving its infrastructure from on-premise data centers to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We saw the pain teams were having with infrastructure and Cloud Formation on AWS,” says Henning Jacobs, Head of Developer Productivity. “There’s still too much operational overhead for the teams and compliance.” To provide better support, cluster management was brought into play.
Solution💡
The company now runs its Docker containers on AWS using Kubernetes orchestration.
Impact💹
With the old infrastructure “it was difficult to properly embrace new technologies, and DevOps teams were considered to be a bottleneck,” says Jacobs. “Now, with this cloud infrastructure, they have this packaging format, which can contain anything that runs on the Linux kernel. This makes a lot of people pretty happy. The engineers love autonomy.
⌨️️Case study:La Redoute
Challenge📉
La Redoute is a leading retail e-commerce company for families in Europe, with plans to accelerate the development of new products and services worldwide. However, in 2014 it was close to bankruptcy and had to pivot fast towards a complete digital transformation. “Our technology platform must be a business enabler. That starts by removing limiting factors,” said Antoine Craske, Director of Architecture & Technology.
Solution💡
After a few months of experimentation, the platform team decided to use Kubernetes as its orchestration platform. The company completed its ecosystem with CNCF projects that they identified as reliable and fitting, in the open-source culture of the company. The choices of technology matched the cloud-native and multi-cloud requirements essential to the transformation of application delivery.
Impact💹
Today, La Redoute is again a brand leader, serving more than 10 million customers. It benefits from streamlining its software delivery lifecycle — from development to operations. Creating a new service is now a matter of minutes, not days, and the adoption of the Kubernetes ecosystem has been growing steadily across its various platforms
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