HOW KUBERNETES IS USED IN INDUSTRIES AND WHAT USE CASES ARE SOLVED BY KUBERNETES?
Before go to why and how lets under “why use Kubernetes!”🤔
The Docker adoption is still growing exponentially as more and more companies have started using it in production. It is important to use an orchestration platform to scale and manage your containers.
Imagine a situation where you have been using Docker for a little while, and have deployed on a few different servers. Your application starts getting massive traffic, and you need to scale up fast; how will you go from 3 servers to 40 servers that you may require? And how will you decide which container should go where? How would you monitor all these containers and make sure they are restarted if they die? This is where Kubernetes comes in.
What are Kubernetes and Docker?
Docker is a platform and tool for building, distributing and running Docker containers. Kubernetes is a container orchestration system for Docker containers that is more extensive than Docker Swarm and is meant to coordinate clusters of nodes at scale in production in an efficient manner.
Firstly we have to understand what is KUBERNETES?
“Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation”
The above video tells more about what Kubernetes is!
Working process In Kubernetes ⚒
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that enables the operation of an elastic web server framework for cloud applications. Kubernetes can support data center outsourcing to public cloud service providers or can be used for web hosting at scale.
The video and image will give you a more high-level idea about the working process of Kubernetes
We understand why, what, and how it works, now time to understand what is the real industry's use case🤷♂️.
Today the majority of the NYT’s customer-facing applications are running on Kubernetes. What an amazing story. The biggest impact has been an increase in the speed of deployment and productivity. Legacy deployments that took up to 45 minutes are now pushed in just a few. It’s also given developers more freedom and fewer bottlenecks. The New York Times has gone from a ticket-based system for requesting resources and weekly deploy schedules to allowing developers to push updates independently.
Challenge, solution, and their result 📈
Challenge faced by NEWYORK TIMES
When the company decided a few years ago to move out of its data centers, its first deployments on the public cloud were smaller, less critical applications managed on virtual machines. “We started building more and more tools, and at some point, we realized that we were doing a disservice by treating Amazon as another data center,” says Deep Kapadia, Executive Director, Engineering at The New York Times. Kapadia was tapped to lead a Delivery Engineering Team that would “design for the abstractions that cloud providers offer us.”
The solution is:
The team decided to use Google Cloud Platform and its Kubernetes-as-a-service offering, GKE.
The result is :
Speed of delivery increased. Some of the legacy VM-based deployments took 45 minutes; with Kubernetes, that time was “just a few seconds to a couple of minutes,” says Engineering Manager Brian Balser. Adds Li: “Teams that used to deploy on weekly schedules or had to coordinate schedules with the infrastructure team now deploy their updates independently, and can do it daily when necessary.” Adopting Cloud Native Computing Foundation technologies allows for a more unified approach to deployment across the engineering staff, and portability for the company.
DEEP KAPADIA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ENGINEERING AT THE NEW YORK TIMES
Founded in 1851 and known as the newspaper of record, The New York Times is a digital pioneer: Its first website launched in 1996, before Google even existed. After the company decided a few years ago to move out of its private data centers — including one located in the pricy real estate of Manhattan. It recently took another step into the future by going cloud-native.
At first, the infrastructure team “managed the virtual machines in the Amazon cloud, and they deployed more critical applications in our data centers and the less critical ones on AWS as an experiment,” says Deep Kapadia, Executive Director, Engineering at The New York Times. “We started building more and more tools, and at some point, we realized that we were doing a disservice by treating Amazon as another data center.”
To get the most out of the cloud, Kapadia was tapped to lead a new Delivery Engineering Team that would “design for the abstractions that cloud providers offer us.” In mid-2016, they began looking at the Google Cloud Platform and its Kubernetes-as-a-service offering, GKE.
At the time, says team member Tony Li, a Site Reliability Engineer, “We had some internal tooling that attempted to do what Kubernetes does for containers, but for VMs. We asked why are we building and maintaining these tools ourselves?”
In early 2017, the first production application — the nytimes.com mobile homepage — began running on Kubernetes, serving just 1% of the traffic. Today, almost 100% of the nytimes.com site’s end-user facing applications run on GCP, with the majority on Kubernetes.
“I think once you get over the initial hump, things get a lot easier and actually a lot faster.”
- by DEEP KAPADIA
The Evolution of The New York Times Tech Stack
This is the fourth episode of Stack Stories, sponsored by STRV. Hosted by Yonas, Founder & CEO, StackShare and featuring special guests Nick Rockwell, CTO of The New York Times and James Cunningham, Ops Lead at Sentry
The New York Times is one of the largest publications in the world with 150 million monthly uniques on their own site and 2–3x that number on third-party platforms like Facebook. While perhaps not often thought of as a “tech company”, the Times deals with challenges in scale and traffic many startups can only dream of.
For this episode, we sat down with Nick Rockwell, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), at The New York Times, and special guest James Cunningham, Operations Lead (and “Google Cloud Expert”) at Sentry, to discuss how technology has evolved at NYT. In the few years he’s been there, Nick has brought the paper from managing their own data centers and using a LAMP stack, to the “modern age” — using React and GraphQL and migrating to Google Cloud.
Conclusion:
In any case, you should make an informed decision and there are many good reasons to go for Kubernetes or leave it. I hope this post will help you in getting closer to making the right decision for you.