How Industries uses Kubernetes?
With the boom of the Automation technology in the IT sector many automation tools and technologies like containerization , Kubernetes , Ansible etc are very popular now days.
So in this article I will be discussing the importance and industry use cases of Kubernetes.
What is Kubernetes ?
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It is basically used for orchestrating the containers which can auto scale and deploy many containers without a down time.
Kubernetes provides us with:
- Service discovery and load balancing
- Storage orchestration
- Automated rollouts and rollbacks
- Automatic bin packing
- Self-healing of the containers
- Secret and configuration management
Industry use cases of Kubernetes
Blackrock
Challenge
The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock operates a very controlled static deployment scheme, which has allowed for scalability over the years. But in their data science division, there was a need for more dynamic access to resources. They want to give every investor access to data science, meaning Python notebooks, or even something much more advanced, like a MapReduce engine based on Spark. The problem is that of creating a perfect python environment on user’s desktop because every user ends up with slightly different environment from the company’s python notebook requirement. So Blackrock wanted to expand and scale their existing environments.
Solution
They wanted to scale their environment with the help of containerization and orchestrate it with kubernetes. So they first tried using docker environment and then the company put together a cross-sectional team of 20 to build an investor research web app using Kubernetes with the goal of getting it into production within one quarter.
The company’s main goal was to rapidly give people tools without having them to install on their desktop. And finally the company hit the goal within 100 days.
Nokia
Challenge
Nokia’s core business is building telecom networks end-to-end; its main products are related to the infrastructure, such as antennas, switching equipment, and routing equipment. Nokia as a telecom vendors have to deliver their software to several telecom operators and put the software into their infrastructure, and each of the operators have a bit different infrastructure. There are operators who are running on bare metal , virtual machines ,VMware Cloud and OpenStack Cloud. They want to run the same product on all of these different infrastructures without changing the product itself.
Solution
The company decided that moving to cloud native technologies would allow teams to have infrastructure-agnostic behavior in their products. Teams at Nokia began experimenting with Kubernetes in pre-1.0 versions. “The simplicity of the label-based scheduling of Kubernetes was a sign that showed us this architecture will scale, will be stable, and will be good for our purposes,” says Csatari. The first Kubernetes-based product, the Nokia Telephony Application Server, went live in early 2018. And now, all the products are doing some kind of re-architecture work, and they’re moving to Kubernetes.
Kubernetes has enabled Nokia’s foray into 5G. The teams using Kubernetes are already seeing clear benefits. By separating the infrastructure and the application layer, they have less dependencies in the system, which means that it’s easier to implement features in the application layer. And because teams can test the exact same binary artifact independently of the target execution environment, they find more errors in early phases of the testing. So they do not need to run the same tests on different target environments, like VMware, OpenStack, or bare metal. As a result they save several hundred hours in every release.
“When people are picking up their phones and making a call on Nokia networks, they are creating containers in the background with Kubernetes.”
— Gergely Csatari, Senior open source engineer, Nokia.
