How industries are using Kubernetes and the major business use-cases solved by it.

Many enterprises adopting Kubernetes realize that Kubernetes is the first step to building scalable modern applications. To get good value from Kubernetes, enterprises need solutions that can monitor and secure Kubernetes applications. Sumo Logic provides the industry’s first Continuous Intelligence Solution for Kubernetes to help enterprises control and manage their Kubernetes deployments.

What is Kubernetes?

In a nutshell, Kubernetes is a system for deploying applications and more efficiently utilizing the containerized infrastructure that powers the apps. Kubernetes can save organizations money because it takes less manpower to manage IT; it makes apps more resilient and performant.

You can also run Kubernetes on-premises or within public Cloud. AWS, Azure, and GCP offer managed Kubernetes solutions to help customers get started quickly and efficiently operate K8s apps. Kubernetes also makes apps a lot more portable, so IT can move them more easily between different clouds and internal environments.

In a nutshell, Kubernetes is the new Linux OS of the Cloud.

Google created Kubernetes and it is now part of CNCF, with very active engagement and contribution from many enterprises large and small.

Speed and Agility of Innovation Drives Customer Experience

Marc Andressen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” Today, every enterprise is a software business, and the enterprise CIO is tasked with delivering applications with high quality and customer experience that rival those of Amazon, Google or Netflix.

What these applications share in common to drive great customer experiences is the need for constant change to keep those experiences fresh, easy and relevant. This requires DevSecOps to constantly release secure updates to implement improvements, fix issues, and drive new features and capabilities. According to the 2019 DevOps Research & Assessment (DORA) State of DevOps Report, elite performers — companies that deploy multiple times per day, release code 208 times faster than low performers (companies that deploy once a month or twice a year). Some of the industry’s leading digital experiences — Amazon, Google or Netflix, for example — deploy on average 11.7 seconds in an effort to gain competitive value through increase usage or revenue.

This need for “speed and agility of innovation” is driving the way companies are building, running and securing their modern applications, which is transforming the software architecture into micro-services to enable faster change overall. Micro-services depend on containerized application and orchestration — automation — to speed deployment of improvements and new capabilities essential to maintaining highly available, secure customer experiences.

Road to Digital and IT Transformation runs through Containers & Orchestration

While the business benefits of digital transformation and software innovation are clearly understood, the IT capabilities needed to deliver these benefits are still evolving. What is very clear is that containers are becoming a must-have platform in the IT architecture. Containers offer benefits of immutable infrastructure with predictable, repeatable, and faster development and deployments. With these capabilities, Containers change the way applications are being architected, designed, developed, packaged, delivered, and managed,paving the way to better application delivery and experience.

But the very strength of containers can become its Achilles heel: it’s very easy to create lots — and we mean lots” — of containers across your apps. And now we have a new problem — how does one manage thousands or even tens of thousands of these containers? How do you control the ephemeral containers that have lifetimes of a few seconds to minutes? How do you optimize resource utilization in a large-scale containerized environments? The answer is Orchestration and Kubernetes.

Here are five fundamental business capabilities that Kubernetes can drive in the enterprise–be it large or small.

1. Faster time to market
2. IT cost optimization
3. Improved scalability and availability
4. Multi-cloud (and hybrid cloud) flexibility
5. Effective migration to the cloud

1. Faster time to market (aka improved app development/deployment efficiencies)

Kubernetes enables a “microservices” approach to building apps. Now you can break up your development team into smaller teams that focus on a single, smaller microservice. These teams are smaller and more agile because each team has a focused function. APIs between these microservices minimize the amount of cross-team communication required to build and deploy. So, ultimately, you can scale multiple small teams of specialized experts who each help support a fleet of thousands of machines.

Kubernetes also allows your IT teams to manage large applications across many containers more efficiently by handling many of the nitty-gritty details of maintaining container-based apps. For example, Kubernetes handles service discovery, helps containers talk to each other, and arranges access to storage from various providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.

2. IT cost optimization

Kubernetes can help your business cut infrastructure costs quite drastically if you’re operating at massive scale. Kubernetes makes a container-based architecture feasible by packing together apps optimally using your cloud and hardware investments. Before Kubernetes, administrators often over-provisioned their infrastructure to conservatively handle unexpected spikes, or simply because it was difficult and time consuming to manually scale containerized applications. Kubenetes intelligently schedules and tightly packs containers, taking into account the available resources. It also automatically scales your application to meet business needs, thus freeing up human resources to focus on other productive tasks.

3. Improved scalability and availability

The success of today’s applications does not depend only on features, but also on the scalability of the application. After all, if an application cannot scale well, it will be highly non-performant at best scale, and totally unavailable, at the worst case.

As an orchestration system, Kubernetes is a critical management system to “auto-magically” scale and improve app performance. Suppose we have a service which is CPU-intensive and with dynamic user load that changes based on business conditions (for example, an event ticketing app that will see dramatic users and loads prior to the event and low usage at other times). What we need here is a solution that can scale up the app and its infrastructure so that new machines are automatically spawned up as the load increases (more users are buying tickets) and scale it down when the load subsides. Kubernetes offers just that capability by scaling up the application as the CPU usage goes above a defined threshold — for example, 90 percent on the current machine. And when the load reduces, Kubernetes can scale back the application, thus optimizing the infrastructure utilization. The Kubernetes auto-scaling is not limited to just infrastructure metrics; any type of metric — resource utilization metrics — even custom metrics can be used to trigger the scaling process.

4. Multi-cloud flexibility

One of the biggest benefits of Kubernetes and containers is that it helps you realize the promise of hybrid and multi-cloud. Enterprises today are already running multi-cloud environments and will continue to do so in the future. Kubernetes makes it much easier is to run any app on any public cloud service or any combination of public and private clouds. This allows you to put the right workloads on the right cloud and to help you avoid vendor lock-in. And getting the best fit, using the right features, and having the leverage to migrate when it makes sense all help you realize more ROI (short and longer term) from your IT investments.

Need more data to validate the multi-cloud and Kubernetes made-in-heaven story? This finding from the Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Report identifies a very interesting upward trend on K8 adoption based on the number of cloud platforms organizations use, with 86 percent of customers on all three using managed or native Kubernetes solutions. Should AWS be worried? Probably not. But, it may be an early sign of a level playing field for Azure and GCP — because apps deployed on K8s can be easily ported across environments (on-premise to cloud or across clouds).

5. Seamless migration to cloud

Whether you are rehosting, replatforming, or refactoring (the entire app and the services that support it are modified to better suit the new compartmentalized environment), Kubernetes has you covered. Since K8s runs consistently across all environments, on-premise and clouds like AWS, Azure and GCP, Kubernetes provides a more seamless and prescriptive path to port your application from on-premise to cloud environments. Rather than deal with all the variations and complexities of the cloud environment, enterprises can follow a more prescribed path:

1. Migrate apps to Kubernetes on-premise. Here you are more focused on replatforming your apps to containers and bringing them under Kubernetes orchestration.
2. Move to a cloud-based Kubernetes instance. You have many options here — run Kubernetes natively or choose a managed Kubernetes environment from the cloud vendor.
3. Now that the application is in the cloud, you can start to optimize your application to the cloud environment and its services.