Why is Enterprise Kubernetes Important?

Source:-containerjournal.com

Ahead of the Enterprise Kubernetes SKILup Day happening May 21, Chief Ambassador for the DevOps Institute, Helen Beal, polled the group of DevOps Ambassadors on why Enterprise Kubernetes is important. To read about the insightful contributions from DevOps practitioners all around the world, check out the listings below.

Helen Beal
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Chichester, England

“DevOps ways of working demand we reduce our batch size so that we can quickly build and test and receive feedback on our experiments so that we can reduce risk and accelerate the flow of value to our customers. It’s hard to do this with monolithic systems which demand large release packages so it’s an architectural imperative to loosely couple our systems to allow for smaller pieces to be updated – this is when we look to microservices. Kubernetes is important for enterprises because these microservices architectures can themselves become very complex and they need to be managed effectively to ensure our increased speed doesn’t compromise our quality or safety.”

@BMK
DevOps Institute and CNCF Ambassador from Wellington, New Zealand

“Customers demand and expect the system to be available 24X7 and to add highly performant features to products as quick as possible to make their experience and system interaction highly productive, smooth and elegant. For them, it does not matter where it runs, and they expect the system to be available when they want and to do the thing that they expect. This has caused organizations to disrupt themselves, innovate and operate in new ways. This means significant uplift in IT infrastructure, application architecture, delivery speed and observability.

As cloud adoption and cloud-native, microservice architectural style is becoming mainstream, building resilient, highly available platforms on static infrastructure is highly challenging. Enterprises adopt an elastic platform like Kubernetes, as it comes with features to self-heal, the platform for distributed architecture, lots of plugin model-based open source software for various functions, extensibility, runs a variety of workloads and, importantly, is based on open standards.”

HimaBindu Veeramachaneni
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Hyderabad, India

“Kubernetes is a system for deploying applications and organizing the containerized infrastructure on cluster servers. The value adds are: cost reduction, accelerated speed, scalability, portability, multi-cloud flexibility, consistent deployment and high availability products as well as services. One of my favorites is its flexibility to run in a hybrid configuration of both public and private instances using the same commands. It can run onsite in your own datacenter or in a public cloud. Really, it’s essential for enterprises to embrace Kubernetes for quality and efficient management of microservices.”

Mitesh Soni
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Mumbai, India

“Resource availability and resource utilization can affect speed, quality and cost in a huge way. Enterprises are still not mature in cloud services usage; while they and service organizations are using cloud computing and Kubernetes, it’s frequently not an enterprise or organization-wide approach. It is not a standard practice or culture and skill development in this area is still work in progress. However, the potential of Kubernetes is not unnoticed but it is a passive approach to include Kubernetes as a part of DevOps practices implementation and not the proactive approach to increase speed, quality and cost reduction. The development and administrator parts of Kubernetes need further attention.”

Daniel Oh
DevOps Institute and CNCF Ambassador from Boston

“Kubernetes solves some of the most common problems developers and IT Ops teams see every day. It provides application deployment, scaling, container management and other capabilities, and it enables enterprises to optimize hardware resource utilization and increase production uptime through fault-tolerant functionality at speed. Learn more about 5 reasons to use Kubernetes that I wrote in opensource.com.”

Phillip Peter
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Harare, Zimbabwe

“In today’s hybrid computing environments it is critical for IT professionals to find ways to develop, test and deploy applications in a seamless and painless way to improve on IT delivery times. Development, testing and production environments are now very practical due to the adoption of containers like Docker. Enterprise organizations who have adopted microservices architecture have to find ways to manage, orchestrate their many containers across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Enterprise Kubernetes is the Swiss knife that cuts across the enterprise’s pain points of container orchestration with self-driving, self-scaling, self-tuning and self-healing capabilities.”

Simone Jo Moore
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Occitane, France

“Let’s take a non-techie view. You don’t need to be a developer or operations technician to appreciate what Kubernetes provides and can do for your business. Simple explanation, it is a unified application programming interface (API). An open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. Originally designed by Google, it is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Remember what an API is all about at its core level—it’s all about the quality level of the interaction in helping one set of technology talk to another set of technology allowing for a wider and deeper system capability. At an enterprise level, this means you are more capable and more agile in your communications and changes across your technology landscape to keep up with the slicing, dicing and orchestration necessary in today’s dynamic business environments.

You don’t need Kubernetes to run your applications but it is certainly an option worth exploring to give your business’ ‘anytime, anywhere’ objective more gumption. Just one more reason why having DevOps culture and strategy will put you ahead in the game of sustainability in a VUCA (Vulnerability; Uncertainty; Complexity; Ambiguity) world.”

Anurag Sharma
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Amsterdam

“Cloud-native is going to be a new normal along with growing edge computing. At this time only Kubernetes can empower/enable enterprise agility, portability and cost-saving by consolidating workloads on shared infrastructure. Kubernetes simply offers a frontier for software development. The new DevOps phase is going to be programmatic, elastic and declarative. Kubernetes can help organizations run containers at the edge such that there is a maximization of resources and smoother and faster functioning of the DevOps teams.”

Jose Adan Ortiz
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Santiago, Chile

“Enterprise Kubernetes is finally here to bring business scalability, cost reduction, fast time to market and omnichannel high availability to satisfy growing users’ demand for innovative products and services. Enterprise Kubernetes—delivered by a public or private cloud—is able to support almost any kind of applications and technologies, from machine learning models execution to modern backend servers.”

Tracy Ragan
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Santa Fe, New Mexico

“The first time I really understood the importance of a modern architecture based on microservices and Kubernetes was at a local meetup. The presenter demonstrated how his company’s solution performed massive pattern matching. He first started by pointing out the number of GPUs they were using. And then he started searching for a pattern. Suddenly, the GPU number went from 10 to 1400+ in seconds. It was my “ahhhhh” moment. With this new architecture we now have the ability to build solutions that can massively scale in seconds and are fault-tolerant. We have finally arrived at the age of AI and ML. Now that is cool and I’m in.”

Marc Hornbeek
DevOps Institute Ambassador and Author, Mexico

“Kubernetes is the No. 1 container orchestrator. It solves the problems of container orchestration in a de facto standard way, avoiding the need to reinvent a solution. It provides a consistent approach across cloud services. It is an extensible enabling technology that solves many use cases to orchestrate elastic infrastructures at scale across clouds because of the standard approach and low cost of the orchestrator.”

Brendan O’Reilly
DevOps Institute Ambassador, Dublin

“Organizations that wish to embrace DevOps have to consider architecture. Microservices facilitate multi-disciplinary teams and their value stream ownership. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) points us at Robust Design. We are designing resilience from the off. Microservices design is robust and enterprise Kubernetes (K8) instances production.”

Biswajit Mohapatra
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Pune, India

“Kubernetes enables DevOps by automating every step of the delivery pipeline making individual components container images. Kubernetes is built using open service and API standards and exposes well-integrated endpoints for the invocation of configuration, orchestration, management and governance APIs for the container world. This helps in building once and running cross-platform, mirror imaging deployment with cloned or replicated environments from dev, test to production ensuring consistent production-like environments. As a result, the problem starts shifting left and issues are fixed at the design and build phase rather than creeping into the run and manage phase. In a nutshell, Kubernetes seamlessly establishes cross-functional collaborations with shared access to the environment empowering more granular control in enterprise DevOps implementations.”

Paul Colmer
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Brisbane, Australia

“Kubernetes is an open source orchestration platform that helps manage containers at enterprise scale. Typically a large enterprise, say more than one thousand employees, tends to put a lot of stress onto the underlying technologies that are delivering business value. These stresses include:

Scaling resources and services to meet demand
Providing extremely high availability of services to customers
Being able to reconfigure the components on the fly, in an instance, in real-time to provide business services with shapechanger capabilities
Can Kubernetes keep up? When you’re managing more than fifty containers, there are five key functions in Kubernetes you should probably know about:

Schedulers help with the heavy lifting and intelligently assigning the work and monitoring the container health.
Service discovery helps keep track of all the services that are needed and monitors the health.
Load balancing services allow architectures to shapechange whilst maintaining service stability.
Resource Management of the CPU, memory, disk and network components to ensure workloads are correctly sized.
Self-healing features automatically detect, kill and restarts failed instances.
The biggest inhibitor for Kubernetes adoption is the complexity of learning and using the service to achieve those business outcomes.”

Savinder Puri
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Reading, England

“Enterprises are moving (or seriously considering moving) into containers across their tech stacks, from modern node.js apps to traditional java/.net to even mainframe. This is a business decision, backed by technology advancement. Thus, there is a growing demand for these core systems to have a rather sophisticated orchestration engine. Enter Kubernetes, fondly called k8s. K8s is well-placed to calm this ‘container zeitgeist’—and give the madness a method. There have been enough organizations that have overzealously ‘moved over,’ only to land into a cost and management behemoth. K8s is the solution, which if done right, can get you into the la-la land. To above and beyond!”

Mark Peters
DevOps Institute Ambassador from San Antonio

“Enterprise Kubernetes provides a common starting point for organizations. Too many groups rely on various software, tools, applications and firmwares with no connective tissue between those items. Developing a K8s enterprise solution allows a common framework. From a security perspective, relying on Kubernetes helps to minimize the attack surface, as well as reducing new changes to manageable intervals, moving security left and allowing the entire organization to deliver increased value on a regular basis.”

Felipe Duenas
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Quito, Ecuador

“Kubernetes is a great open source option giving you the freedom to take advantage of your on-premises, hybrid or public cloud infrastructure, allowing you to effortlessly move workloads wherever you want. Application workflows can be optimized to speed development time. A proprietary orchestration solution may suffice at first, but often requires robust automation when you need to scale. That is why Kubernetes was designed as a platform: to be able to build an ecosystem of components and tools that make it easier to deploy, scale and manage applications.”

Jimit Rangras
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Ahmedabad, India

“Since more and more enterprises are on a digital transformation journey, it is crucial to build a highly scalable and resilient infrastructure by leveraging the best tools, technologies and practices available. To achieve this, DevOps plays a vital role in making the entire process automated, hassle-free, ensuring reliability and providing scalability and agility to power innovation. Kubernetes can be leveraged in order to craft enterprise-grade highly scalable and resilient solutions. End-to-end continuous integration and continuous deployment/delivery can be achieved, thereby automating the deployment process, continuous monitoring can be achieved by leveraging various monitoring and operational intelligence platforms/tools which can be easily integrated with Kubernetes. Automation of the deployment process along with continuous monitoring can result in making the systems reliable and Kubernetes has a strong ecosystem revolving around it, which makes it a preferable choice for deploying enterprise-grade applications at scale.”

Himanshu Patel
DevOps Institute Ambassador from Dallas

“Operational challenges of availability, reliability, stability, fail safely, scaling, security, quality and resource utilization boil down to increased cost, reputational loss and uncompetitiveness in the market for any organization. That impacts business and customers besides turning talented engineering staff to the passive and inefficient culture of spinning wheels over and over again! Containers and Kubernetes offer a distinct advantage in evolving industry and hyper-growth time to bring equality across environments. That truly nurtures the concept of “shift left” as non-functional challenges are now easier to identify and remediate in lower environments. It also brings unprecedented efficiency in building, tearing down, scaling, managing and monitoring stateful and stateless containers to empower organizations to focus more on their business needs as operational challenges become trivial.”