Kubernates is used by Spotify | TASK 16 | ARTH
By: Gaurav Sharma
Tags: Case Study, Kubernates, Docker

What is Kubernates??

Kubernetes provides a platform to orchestrate or manage the Docker containers, as managing thousands of containers manually with Docker CLI is a very difficult task. That’s why it’s also called COE(Container Orchestration Engine). It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Characteristics of Kubernetes

Firstly Kubernetes is an open source software which use to implement and manage those containers on a large scale. It can manage containers any type & any number of servers at the same time. Kubernetes was designed to be used anywhere, so it can be used for managing containers on public cloud or VM. It can be integrated with networking, storage, security, telemetry and other services. It offers the simplicity of Platforms as a Service (PaaS) with the flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Features of Kubernates

It has the ability to automatically place containers according to our requirements, without affecting availability. Kubernetes assigns containers their own IP addresses and a unique DNS name for a set of containers and can do the load balancing. Kubernates helps in Planning as it decides in which node each container will run according to the resources it requires. It restart failed containers, replace and re-program them when nodes die. Also remove unresponsive containers and do not publish them until they are ready. In Kubernates sensitive information such as passwords or ssh keys are stored in Kubernetes hidden file named ‘secrets’. Both the application’s configuration and secrets are deployed and updated without having to rebuild the image or expose sensitive information.

Industries are using Kubernates???

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.

Kubernetes hits the sweet spot for container cluster management because it gives developers the tools they need to quickly and efficiently respond to customer demands while relieving the burden of running applications in the cloud.

It does this by eliminating many of the manual tasks associated with deploying and scaling your containerized applications so that you can run your software more reliably when moved from one environment to another. For example, you can schedule and deploy any number of containers onto a node cluster (across public, private, or hybrid clouds) and Kubernetes then does the job of managing those workloads so they are doing what you intend.

Case Studies

Airbnb

Airbnb’s transition from a monolithic to a microservices architecture is pretty amazing. They needed to scale continuous delivery horizontally, and the goal was to make continuous delivery available to the company’s 1,000 or so engineers so they could add new services. Airbnb adopted Kubernetes to support over 1,000 engineers concurrently configuring and deploying over 250 critical services to Kubernetes. The net result is that AirBnb can now do over 500 deploys per day on average.

Tinder

One of the best examples of accelerating time to market comes from Tinder. This blog post describes Tinder’s K8 journey well. And here’s the cliff notes version of the story: Due to high traffic volume, Tinder’s engineering team faced challenges of scale and stability. And they realized that the answer to their struggle is Kubernetes. Tinder’s engineering team migrated 200 services and ran a Kubernetes cluster of 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers. While the migration process wasn’t easy, the Kubernetes solution was critical to ensure smooth business operations going further.

Spotify

Spotify is an early K8s adopter and has significant cost saving values by adopting K8s as described in this note. Leveraging K8s, Spotify has seen 2–3x CPU utilization using the orchestration capabilities of K8s, resulting in better IT spend optimization.

Pinterest

Pinterest is another early K8s customer. Leveraging K8s, the Pinterest IT team reclaimed over 80 percent of capacity during non-peak hours. They now use30 percent less instance-hours per day compared to the static cluster.

Conclusion

Kubernates is a great plateform in present & will grow in future. Container technology is also evolving so it’s obvious that use of COE technology like Kubernates is increasing. Also flexibility of kubernates is helping in it’s growth. Integration of Kubernates & Hadoop, Spark, Apache HBASE, Public Clouds is widely used in industies.