Today’s digital age is fueled by users who demand more and more value from technology services. The smartphone and the cloud have combined to usher in an age where software runs the world, whether it is ordering food or a ride, paying for utilities, or getting your entertainment fix.
The design and deployment of software has evolved to respond to the evolving a user demand as traditional monolithic architectures have proven difficult when it comes to supporting rapid scaling and experimentation.
Containers and microservices are fast becoming the go-to model especially for modern application that are planet scale by nature.
Dynamic Application architecture: Choice of Microservices
First, your application code has to be made loosely coupled from the code base, independently deployable, highly maintainable and testable and so on. This can be achieved by adapting to microservice based architecture.
Take the example of an e-commerce web application where a customer has to first login to the portal / application, lists out all his essentials for purchase and finally place an order. A microservice architecture approach would see the separation of Logging service, Inventory service and Shipping service
Each service would have its own database and communicate with the other services via an API gateway. The development and management of each service is done separately, meaning that a service can be scaled or modified to suit different needs and situations without necessarily breaking the entire application.
Top reasons when microservices and containers are preferred
Online services that see large seasonal and non-seasonal usage spikes
When web pages involve rich dynamic contents that is constructed from many backend queries
Business demands new features to be rapidly released into production
Systems that cannot afford downtime and need to implement software changes using techniques like canary release and blue green deployment
Create closed looped system that can self-correct and maintain itself at a desired state
Need to leverage many recent innovations in the open-source software ecosystem
A microservices based architecture application typically follows 3 principles:
Application architecture to be made dynamic and loosely coupled
Enable flexi deployment architecture
Simplifying Operations
Flexible Deployment Architecture: Choice of containers
A container is a bundling of an application and all its dependencies as a package, that allows it to be deployed easily and consistently regardless of environment. These dependencies include binaries, libraries and configuration files needed to run the app.
Just like how shipping containers standardized transportation of cargo globally bringing about efficiency and speed, software containers solve the problem of how to get software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. Whether it’s deploying on a developer’s laptop, a local test environment, or a production environment on the cloud, a container abstracts away any differences in OS distributions and underlying infrastructure.
Now imagine in large scale industries like Car Manufacturing which involves a ton of components (software) that need to work in tandem for a perfect functioning without any failures. As the number of components grow so does the container list and managing so many containers would introduce operational complexities and hence was introduced a concept called Kubernetes.Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform designed to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy and operate applications in a microservice architecture. It does so by creating an abstraction layer on top of a group of hosts, so that development teams can deploy their applications and let Kubernetes manage their activities.
Consideration for production grade Kubernetes:
While Kubernetes solves most of the problems in management, deployment and scaling up it also has some downsides like managing CI/CD pipeline scripts for deployment, setting up network based on customer’s needs, configurations like auto-scaling, manual alerting, testing etc. As Kubernetes get more popular with the developer community, a common scenario seen is the sprawl of Kubernetes clusters in an enterprise.
It becomes important for to automate Kubernetes with a sophisticated approach in getting rid of any manual efforts that could increase operational and infrastructure costs. To avoid getting into a fatigue of managign the Kubernetes sprawl, it is highly recommended enterprises consider automated platform like ‘KKP – Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform’ which enables a self-service capability to application teams to speed up development cycles. For operators, Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform automates deployment and full cluster lifecycle management, removing the pain of running Kubernetes in production and freeing up valuable resources to drive business innovation.
Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform comes with native support for all major cloud and on-premise providers. Deploy clusters with a consistent experience across your preferred infrastructure stack. Eliminate vendor lock-in and dynamically move workloads based on your requirements.
Run both modern cloud native microservices and legacy applications with centralized governance, security, and control. Empower teams to run their infrastructure while still keeping it in line with global policies. Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform is certified by the CNCF and enterprise-proven.
