How Kubernetes is used in Industries and what all use cases are solved by Kubernetes?
By: Kavin Krishna Prasad M
Tags: Containers, Orchestration, Kubernetes, Cluster, Pods

What is Kubernetes?

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.

In other words, 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.

Kubernetes was originally developed and designed by engineers at Google. Google was one of the early contributors to Linux container technology and has talked publicly about how everything at Google runs in containers. (This is the technology behind Google’s cloud services.)

Google generates more than 2 billion container deployments a week, all powered by its internal platform, Borg. Borg was the predecessor to Kubernetes, and the lessons learned from developing Borg over the years became the primary influence behind much of Kubernetes technology.

What can you do with Kubernetes?

The primary advantage of using Kubernetes in your environment, especially if you are optimizing app dev for the cloud, is that it gives you the platform to schedule and run containers on clusters of physical or virtual machines (VMs). With Kubernetes you can:

Orchestrate containers across multiple hosts.

Make better use of hardware to maximize resources needed to run your enterprise apps.

Control and automate application deployments and updates.

Mount and add storage to run stateful apps.

Scale containerized applications and their resources on the fly.

Declaratively manage services, which guarantees the deployed applications are always running the way you intended them to run.

Health-check and self-heal your apps with autoplacement, autorestart, autoreplication, and autoscaling.

How does Kubernetes work?

working Kubernetes deployment is called a cluster. You can visualize a Kubernetes cluster as two parts: the control plane and the compute machines, or nodes.

Each node is its own Linux® environment, and could be either a physical or virtual machine. Each node runs pods, which are made up of containers.

The control plane is responsible for maintaining the desired state of the cluster, such as which applications are running and which container images they use. Compute machines actually run the applications and workloads.

Kubernetes runs on top of an operating system (Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, for example) and interacts with pods of containers running on the nodes.

The Kubernetes control plane takes the commands from an administrator (or DevOps team) and relays those instructions to the compute machines.

This handoff works with a multitude of services to automatically decide which node is best suited for the task. It then allocates resources and assigns the pods in that node to fulfill the requested work.

The desired state of a Kubernetes cluster defines which applications or other workloads should be running, along with which images they use, which resources should be made available to them, and other such configuration details.

From an infrastructure point of view, there is little change to how you manage containers. Your control over containers just happens at a higher level, giving you better control without the need to micromanage each separate container or node.

Your work involves configuring Kubernetes and defining nodes, pods, and the containers within them. Kubernetes handles orchestrating the containers.

Where you run Kubernetes is up to you. This can be on bare metal servers, virtual machines, public cloud providers, private clouds, and hybrid cloud environments. One of Kubernetes’ key advantages is it works on many different kinds of infrastructure.

Case Study: Babylon

Challenge:

A large number of Babylon’s products leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence, and in 2019, there wasn’t enough computing power in-house to run a particular experiment. The company was also growing (from 100 to 1,600 in three years) and planning expansion into other countries.

Solution:

Babylon had migrated its user-facing applications to a Kubernetes platform in 2018, so the infrastructure team turned to Kubeflow, a toolkit for machine learning on Kubernetes. “We tried to create a Kubernetes core server, we deployed Kubeflow, and we orchestrated the whole experiment, which ended up being a really good success,” says AI Infrastructure Lead Jérémie Vallée. The team began building a self-service AI training platform on top of Kubernetes.

Impact:

Instead of waiting hours or days to be able to compute, teams can get access instantaneously. Clinical validations used to take 10 hours; now they are done in under 20 minutes. The portability of the cloud native platform has also enabled Babylon to expand into other countries.

“Kubernetes is a great platform for machine learning because it comes with all the scheduling and scalability that you need.” — JÉRÉMIE VALLÉE, AI INFRASTRUCTURE LEAD AT BABYLON.

Case Study: Booz Allen Hamilton

Challenge:

In 2017, Booz Allen Hamilton’s Strategic Innovation Group worked with the federal government to relaunch the decade-old recreation.gov website, which provides information and real-time booking for more than 100,000 campsites and facilities on federal lands across the country. The infrastructure needed to be agile, reliable, and scalable — as well as repeatable for the other federal agencies that are among Booz Allen Hamilton’s customers.

Solution:

“The only way that we thought we could be successful with this problem across all the different agencies is to create a microservice architecture and containers, so that we could be very dynamic and very agile to any given agency for whatever requirements that they may have,” says Booz Allen Hamilton Senior Lead Technologist Martin Folkoff. To meet those requirements, Folkoff’s team looked to Kubernetes for orchestration.

Impact:

With the recreation.gov Kubernetes platform, changes can be implemented in about 30 minutes, compared to the multiple hours or even days legacy government applications require to review the code, get approval, and deploy the fix. Recreation.gov deploys to production on average 10 times a day. With monitoring, security, and logging built in, developers can create and publish new services to production within a week. Additionally, Folkoff says, “supporting the large, existing monoliths in the government is extremely expensive,” and migrating into a more modern platform has resulted in perhaps 50% cost savings.

“When there’s a regulatory change in an agency, or a legislative change in Congress, or an executive order that changes the way you do business, how do I deploy that and get that out to the people who need it rapidly? At the end of the day, that’s the problem we’re trying to help the government solve with tools like Kubernetes.” — JOSH BOYD, CHIEF TECHNOLOGIST AT BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON

Case Study: Booking .com

Challenge:

In 2016, Booking.com migrated to an OpenShift platform, which gave product developers faster access to infrastructure. But because Kubernetes was abstracted away from the developers, the infrastructure team became a “knowledge bottleneck” when challenges arose. Trying to scale that support wasn’t sustainable.

Solution:

After a year operating OpenShift, the platform team decided to build its own vanilla Kubernetes platform — and ask developers to learn some Kubernetes in order to use it. “This is not a magical platform,” says Ben Tyler, Principal Developer, B Platform Track. “We’re not claiming that you can just use it with your eyes closed. Developers need to do some learning, and we’re going to do everything we can to make sure they have access to that knowledge.”

Impact:

Despite the learning curve, there’s been a great uptick in adoption of the new Kubernetes platform. Before containers, creating a new service could take a couple of days if the developers understood Puppet, or weeks if they didn’t. On the new platform, it can take as few as 10 minutes. About 500 new services were built on the platform in the first 8 months.

As our users learn Kubernetes and become more sophisticated Kubernetes users, they put pressure on us to provide a better, more native Kubernetes experience, which is great. It’s a super healthy dynamic.” — BEN TYLER, PRINCIPAL DEVELOPER, B PLATFORM TRACK AT BOOKING.COM

CASE STUDY: AppDirect

Challenge:

AppDirect provides an end-to-end commerce platform for cloud-based products and services. When Director of Software Development Pierre-Alexandre Lacerte began working there in 2014, the company had a monolith application deployed on a “tomcat infrastructure, and the whole release process was complex for what it should be,” he says. “There were a lot of manual steps involved, with one engineer building a feature, then another team picking up the change. So you had bottlenecks in the pipeline to ship a feature to production.” At the same time, the engineering team was growing, and the company realized it needed a better infrastructure to both support that growth and increase velocity.

Solution:

“My idea was: Let’s create an environment where teams can deploy their services faster, and they will say, ‘Okay, I don’t want to build in the monolith anymore. I want to build a service,’” says Lacerte. They considered and prototyped several different technologies before deciding to adopt Kubernetes in early 2016. Lacerte’s team has also integrated Prometheus monitoring into the platform; tracing is next. Today, AppDirect has more than 50 microservices in production and 15 Kubernetes clusters deployed on AWS and on premise around the world.

Impact:

The Kubernetes platform has helped support the engineering team’s 10x growth over the past few years. Coupled with the fact that they were continually adding new features, Lacerte says, “I think our velocity would have slowed down a lot if we didn’t have this new infrastructure.” Moving to Kubernetes and services has meant that deployments have become much faster due to less dependency on custom-made, brittle shell scripts with SCP commands. Time to deploy a new version has shrunk from 4 hours to a few minutes. Additionally, the company invested a lot of effort to make things self-service for developers. “Onboarding a new service doesn’t require Jira tickets or meeting with three different teams,” says Lacerte. Today, the company sees 1,600 deployments per week, compared to 1–30 before. The company also achieved cost savings by moving its marketplace and billing monoliths to Kubernetes from legacy EC2 hosts as well as by leveraging autoscaling, as traffic is higher during business hours.