Why DevOps Engineers so Obsessed with Kubernetes, and so are we?

by- Prashant Ghildiyal, Co-Founder — Devtron Labs

Kubernetes is nothing we can’t achieve with many well-written scripts compiled together on top of VMWare — you must have heard people saying this. Then why are we so obsessed with Kubernetes, and so is the DevOps?

When we look at the Kubernetes adoption, we see that it has grown exponentially and is evident from Airbnb’s Kubernetes adoption. Its transition from a monolithic to a multi-services architecture Airbnb that was eyeing support to 1000 engineers happened successfully with Kubernetes deployment.

To understand it let us first glance at some of the facts; Kubernetes GitHub repo has more than 2400 contributors who have made more than 88400 commits with the initial release 5 years ago. This throws light on whether any company anticipates their DevOps team to build the same quality product as Kubernetes. At the same time, they have to fight the fire from 10 directions, then that company better be monetizing it.

It doesn’t make business sense to invest substantial money and time into building a product that does not give your company a competitive edge, much like Niantic Inc. Pokemon Go. This game saw massive user traffic, which became stress for its engineers, who found it difficult for servers to handle. But by making use of Kubernetes, the engineers diverted attention from the scaling part to developing new features and app logic.

The amount of endeavor which has gone into building the right abstraction and well-thought-through APIs has put power back right into the hand of DevOps. They can now work more towards a tuning, upgrading, and securing infrastructure and microservices apart from creating DIY tools for developers. So it should not be a matter of amazement that Devops think Kubernetes gives them the silver bullets they always wanted in their gun.

A survey conducted by Platform9 at kubecon Barcelona 2019 showed that 76.6% of respondents are looking at improving their speed to deployment by using Kubernetes. The next expectation was tied, with 50% believing they will modernize their legacy apps and another 50% believing it will help them automate app operations.

Takeaways from KubeCon 2019 Survey

Kubernetes in Production

Kubernetes Challenges

Multi-cloud Kubernetes

Kubernetes Add-ons

Kubernetes Use Cases

Let’s look at some of the things which make Kubernetes the next big thing after cloud?

Drive innovation through open-source software:

With the helm charts available for almost every open source project doing a quick POC is very easy for the development team. Just have the right segregation of environment, policies, and access control for them, and they can really make you time travel to the future.

Just remember — they pull you towards the future you desire to live.

Shoot productivity through the sky:

Accelerate state of the DevOps report 2019; highest performing engineers are 1.5 times more likely to use easy-to-use tools. Well, that’s comprehensible, as fast-changing technology will make them remember lesser things and work their way through to be more productive.

Kubernetes provides a uniform interface and declarative configuration, which opens up the feasibility of creating easy-to-user tools now more than ever.

I recently talked to the DevOps head in one of the big companies that run its systems on Kubernetes; he told me they are taking control back from the developers; they don’t want developers to modify YAML themselves as it resulted in a major outage.

Just remember — Kubernetes needs another abstraction layer on top of it to make developers 1.5X developers.

Do cheap experiments:

Okay, I am cheating here a bit. You can do it primarily because of containerization, which allows you to have much finer-grained resource allotment. Still, then you can't use containers at scale unless you are using a container management system, Kubernetes.

Also, you can leverage the power of multiple cloud providers; your cloud provider is not strong in a particular region plug into another one, you have gotten credits from one of the cloud providers test load on their infra, you can even use your local servers (hybrid cloud) similarly.

Just remember — Visibility of infrastructure and applications is important. Otherwise, the cost may go up, and stability may go down.

So what do you think? If you have another reason to be obsessed or gotcha to help people leverage Kubernetes, do let us know in the comments section.