Kubernetes & companies UseCases:
By: Zainab Bhabhrawala
Tags: Kubernetes, Vimal Daga, Righteducation, Makingindiafutureready, Microservices

Kubernetes is a container orchestration / portable cloud platform that is becoming the de-facto standard for running microservices infrastructures in the cloud. It was originally developed and designed by engineers at Google. 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.

With Kubernetes one can:

Orchestrate containers across multiple hosts.

2. Control and automate application deployments and updates.

3. Mount and add storage to run stateful apps.

4. Scale containerized applications and their resources on the fly.

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

Here are some companies examples using Kubernetes:

SPOTIFY:

Spotify was Launched in 2008 it is a audio-streaming platform that has now grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. By late 2017, the community of people using Spotify started growing and it became quite difficult to manage with a team of 3 to 4 people. Soon they decided to migrate their services from Helios to Kubernetes by 2018 they started addressing the core technology issues required for the migration. Migration started late that year and has accelerated in 2019. Today The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes over 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling. In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold. With a pull request, it creates a temporary staging environment that self destructs after 24 hours, It’s all facilitated by Kubernetes.

PINTEREST:

Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra co-founded Pinterest back in March 2010. It is a “visual discovery tool” that was originally created for people to share ideas and inspiration for various interests and projects. After eight years in existence, Pinterest had grown into 1,000 microservices and multiple layers of infrastructure and diverse set-up tools and platforms. By late 2016 led they decided of creating the fastest path from an idea to production, without making engineers worry about the underlying infrastructure. Hence they started moving services to Docker containers by 2017 , the team began looking at orchestration to help create efficiencies and manage them in a decentralized way. After an evaluation of various solutions, Pinterest went with Kubernetes. By moving to Kubernetes the team was able to build on-demand scaling and new failover policies, in addition to simplifying the overall deployment and management of a complicated piece of infrastructure such as Jenkins. the team reclaimed over 80 percent of capacity during non-peak hours. As a result, the Jenkins Kubernetes cluster now uses 30 percent less instance-hours per-day when compared to the previous static cluster. Today there are 1,000 microservices running and hundreds of thousands of data jobs.

ADIDAS:

It was founded by Adolf “Adi” Dassler in Germany In July 1924, They were looking for ways to shorten the time it took to get a project up and running and into the adidas infrastructure. They found the solution with containerization, agile development, continuous delivery, and a cloud native platform that includes Kubernetes and Prometheus. In just a span of six months after the project began, 100% of the adidas e-commerce site was running on Kubernetes. Load time for the e-commerce site was reduced by half. Releases went from every 4 to 6 weeks to 3 to 4 times a day. With 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds per month, adidas is now running 40% of its most critical, impactful systems on its cloud native platform. They filled the gaps that no one wants to take care of, and made the stuff that is usually painful as painless as possible. To improve speed, operability, and observability. In early 2017, adidas chose Giant Swarm to consult, install, configure, and run all of its Kubernetes clusters in AWS and on premise. It’s relieving the development team from tasks that they don’t want to do, but at the same time giving the visibility of what is behind the curtain, so they can also control it.

IBM:

IBM Cloud is a public, private, and hybrid cloud which provides functionality across a diverse set of runtimes from its Open Whisk-based function as a service offering, managed Kubernetes and containers, to Cloud platform as a service. In the later part of 2017, the IBM Cloud Container Registry team wanted to build out an image trust service. The work on this new service culminated with its public availability in the IBM Cloud in February 2018. The image trust service, called Portieris, is fully based on the Cloud Native open source project Notary. Portieris is a Kubernetes admission controller for enforcing content trust. Users can create image security policies for each Kubernetes namespace, or at the cluster level, and enforce different levels of trust for different images. it makes it possible for users to consume the company’s Notary offering from within their IKS clusters. This enables users to be able to have their IKS cluster verify that the image they’re loading containers from contains exactly what they expect it to, and Portieris is what allows an IKS cluster to apply that verification. The Docker Registry uses hashes to ensure that image content is correct, and data is encrypted both in flight and at rest. But it does not provide any guarantees of who pushed an image. They used Notary to enable users to sign images in their private registry namespaces if they so choose. Today it has became the de facto standard for image signing in the container ecosystem.

These are just the few examples but nowadays Kubernetes is widely accepted by lots of companies.