{"id":55836,"date":"2024-10-14T11:10:04","date_gmt":"2024-10-14T15:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdtimes.com\/?p=55836"},"modified":"2024-10-23T12:45:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T16:45:48","slug":"speedrunning-kubernetes-in-the-enterprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdtimes.com\/softwaredev\/speedrunning-kubernetes-in-the-enterprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Speedrunning Kubernetes in the enterprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around 50% of attendees to KubeCon in Salt Lake City will be first-timers. If that\u2019s you: welcome, it\u2019s gonna be an awesome show.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Like thousands of others in businesses around the world, you\u2019ve kicked the tires on K8s and decided that it\u2019s worth committing to, at least enough to justify the cost of a week in SLC. You\u2019re on site to scope out technologies and vendors and learn best practices as you put Kubernetes into production in some shape or form.<\/span><\/p>\n

So here\u2019s the no-nonsense advice you need to make your next 12 months hurt less.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. DIY does not work at scale<\/strong><\/h5>\n

If you\u2019re serious about Kubernetes, <\/span>the data says<\/span><\/a> you will end up with tens or hundreds of clusters. You need them to look and behave the same, consistently, otherwise you\u2019ll drive yourself mad with troubleshooting and policy violations. You need the ability to stand a new cluster up for a new requirement in minutes, not weeks, or you\u2019ll be very unpopular with your app dev teams.<\/span><\/p>\n

We all love rolling up our sleeves and tinkering, and when you were learning K8s principles and building your first cluster (\u2018the hard way\u2019 or not), that\u2019s the right way to do it. You\u2019re in there, writing scripts, wrangling kubectl, tweaking yaml.<\/span><\/p>\n

But DIY does not scale<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, there are companies out there that rolled their own Kubernetes \u2018management platform\u2019 over the past six or seven years, and got it working pretty well. If you asked them over a beer what they\u2019d do if they were starting afresh today, most of them would do it differently. They would look for an easy way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Learn from them: you need repeatable templates and push-button automation, but it probably doesn’t make sense to DIY your own tooling to do that.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Building the cluster is the easy bit<\/strong><\/h5>\n

K8s beginners naturally focus on getting their first clusters up and running, and the end goal is seeing their handful of nodes in a \u2018ready\u2019 state. Yes, it\u2019s challenging \u2014 but believe it or not, it\u2019s the easy bit.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now you\u2019ve got to build the <\/span>rest of the enterprise-grade stack<\/span><\/a>, everything from load balancers to secrets management, logging and observability. In meme parlance, it\u2019s \u201cthe rest of the ****ing owl\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Oh, and you need to patch, upgrade, scale, reconfigure, secure, monitor and troubleshoot that full stack. At scale. Frequently. Forever.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unless you are blessed with unlimited headcount or very patient internal customers, you probably need to look at automation for this part, too. You\u2019re not looking for a build tool \u2014 you\u2019re looking for fleet lifecycle management.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of our customers is well on their journey to enterprise-wide Kubernetes, primarily on-prem, and in a highly regulated industry. Last week we interviewed him (on condition of anonymity) about his journey, and he explained how this realization hit him, too:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI didn’t know what my team size was going to be, and at that point it was just me, and I wasn’t going to go around manually building 60 clusters or 600 clusters. There’s no way I could do that. I’d be spending all my time doing it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf we’re going to do this and be able to reliably create clusters the same way at scale, we cannot be doing it by hand. So I wanted to build a platform that was mostly automated.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe need not only automation to create the clusters, but we also need to make sure that they’re maintained and updated. Someone’s got to sit in the chair for hours and do that. And that’s what led us down the path of trying to find an enterprise container management solution.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

3. Prepare for your future, today<\/strong><\/h5>\n

For a decade now, Kubernetes has been surprising us all with its versatility and extensibility, with custom resources and operators and the power of the K8s API.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You may have just a few mainstream use cases today, likely self-service \u2018Kubernetes as a Service\u2019 (KaaS) in the cloud or virtualized data center. But who knows what the future holds for K8s in your business?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n