Learn why legacy applications become problematic and how Kubernetes can transform your applications for modern scalability, reliability and security.
Kubernetes: The Roadmap For Legacy Application Modernisation Read More »
Cloud-Native
Learn about the three trends impacting modern app development by unlocking new opportunities, streamlining workflows and driving innovation.
Top 3 Trends Shaping Modern App Development in 2024 Read More »
Cloud-Native
Microservices architecture has become the go-to choice for modern companies, offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability, especially in cloud-native environments. However, this architectural shift introduces new and unique security challenges, with authorisation standing out as a paramount concern.
Building a Secure & Scalable Microservices Authorisation Architecture with Kubernetes Read More »
Cloud-Native
Navigating the Future of Software Development The world of software development is rapidly changing. To stay competitive, organisations need to not only keep up with the changes but also strategically adopt methods that improve agility, security, and dependability. The emergence of cloud computing, microservices, and containers has given rise to an innovative approach to creating and deploying software in a cloud-native way. Cloud-native applications are designed to be scalable, resilient, and secure, and they are often delivered through DevOps or DevSecOps methodologies. The markets for cloud-native development, platform engineering, and DevSecOps are all witnessing substantial growth, fuelled by the growing demand for streamlined software development practices and heightened security protocols. This article will explore how the intersection of cloud-native development, platform engineering, and DevSecOps is reshaping the landscape of software development. Cloud Native Development: Building for the Future Cloud-native development represents a significant transformation in the approach to designing and deploying software. It revolves around crafting applications specifically tailored for cloud environments. These applications are usually constructed from microservices, which are compact, self-contained units collaborating to provide the application’s features. This architectural approach endows cloud-native applications with superior scalability and resilience when compared to conventional monolithic applications. Key Benefits of Cloud Native Development: Platform Engineering: The Glue that Holds It Together Platform engineering is the bridge between development and operations. It is about providing the tools and infrastructure that developers need to build, test, and deploy their applications seamlessly. Think of it as an internal developer platform, offering a standardised environment for building and running software. Why Platform Engineering Matters: DevSecOps: Weaving Security into the Fabric DevSecOps extends the DevOps philosophy by emphasising the integration of security into every phase of the software development lifecycle. It shifts security from being an afterthought to an initiative-taking and continuous process. The Importance of DevSecOps: Embarking on the Cloud Native, Platform Engineering, and DevSecOps Odyssey While there exist various avenues for implementing cloud-native, platform engineering, and DevSecOps practices, the optimal approach hinges on an organisation’s unique requirements. Nevertheless, some overarching steps that organisations can consider include: In summation, cloud-native development, platform engineering, and DevSecOps are not mere buzzwords; they are strategic mandates for organisations aiming to flourish in the digital era. These practices pave the way for heightened agility, cost-effectiveness, security, and reliability in software development. Conclusion: As market intelligence attests, the adoption of these practices is not decelerating; it is gaining momentum. Organisations that wholeheartedly embrace cloud-native development, invest in platform engineering, and prioritise DevSecOps will be ideally positioned to navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities of tomorrow. The moment to embark on this transformative journey is now, ensuring that your software development processes are not just future-ready but also primed to deliver value at an unprecedented velocity and with unwavering security.
Navigating the Future of Software Development Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
Top Cloud Plays in 2023: Unlocking Innovation and Agility Cloud Computing has been around since the early 2000’s, while the technology landscape continues to evolve rapidly and adoption increased (20% CAGR), offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation and digital transformation. The meaning of digital transformation is also changing with cloud decision makers viewing Digital transformation as more than a “lift and shift”, instead they see vast opportunity within the Cloud ecosystems to help reinforce their long-term success. As businesses increasingly embrace cloud, certain cloud plays have emerged as key drivers of success, underpinned by companies including Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and VMWare who have all developed very strong technology ecosystems that have transitioned from a manual and costly Data Centre model. In this blog, we will explore the top cloud plays, from our perspective, that organisations should consider unlocking to reach their full potential in 2023. Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies: Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies have gained significant traction in 2023. Organisations are leveraging multiple cloud providers and combining public and private cloud environments to achieve greater flexibility, scalability, and resilience through their investment. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches allow businesses to choose the best services from different providers while maintaining control over critical data and applications. This strategy helps mitigate vendor lock-in leveraging Kubernetes Container orchestration, including AKS, EKS & GKE and VMWare Tanzu, optimise costs, and tailor cloud deployments to specific business requirements and use cases. Cloud-Native Application Development Cloud-Native Application Development: Cloud-native application development is a transformative cloud play that enables organisations to build and deploy applications, through optimised DevSecOps practices, specifically designed for advanced cloud environments. This model leverages containerization, CICD, microservices architecture, and orchestration platforms again emphasising Kubernetes, a strong Cloud Native foundational play. Cloud-native applications are designed to be highly scalable, resilient, and agile, allowing organisations to rapidly adapt to changing business needs. By embracing cloud-native development, businesses can accelerate time-to-market, improve scalability, and enhance developer productivity embedding strong Developer Experience (DevEx) practices. Serverless Computing Serverless computing: is a game-changer for businesses seeking to build applications without worrying about server management. With serverless computing, developers can focus solely on writing code while the cloud provider handles infrastructure provisioning and scaling. An example of this is Microsoft Azure Serverless Platform or AWS Lambda. This cloud play offers automatic scaling, cost optimisation, and event-driven architectures, allowing businesses to build highly scalable and cost-effective applications. Serverless computing simplifies development efforts, reduces operational overhead, and enables companies to quickly respond to changing application workloads. Cloud Security and Compliance Cloud security and compliance: are critical cloud plays that organisations cannot afford to overlook in 2023 particularly with recent data breaches at Optus and Medicare. Leveraging security as a foundational element of your cloud native journey is crucial for ensuring the protection, integrity, and compliance of your applications and data. Cloud providers offer robust security frameworks, encryption services, identity and access management solutions, and compliance certifications. By leveraging these cloud security products and practices, businesses can enhance their data protection, safeguard customer information, and ensure regulatory compliance. Strong security and compliance measures build trust, mitigate risks, and protect organisations from potential data breaches. Data Analytics and Machine Learning: Data analytics and machine learning (ML) are powerful cloud plays that drive data-driven decision-making and unlock actionable insights. Cloud providers offer advanced analytics and ML services that enable businesses to leverage their data effectively. By harnessing cloud-based data analytics and ML capabilities, businesses can gain valuable insights, predict trends, automate processes, and enhance customer experiences. These cloud plays empower organisations to extract value from their data, optimize operations, and drive innovation while providing an enhanced customer experience. As the evolution of Cloud Native, Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Strategies accelerate, strategically adopting the above drivers help enable innovation, agility, and business growth. Importantly Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies provide enhanced security, flexibility, while cloud-native application development empowers rapid application deployment and better developer experience (DevEx), leveraging DevSecOps and Automation practices. These are critical initiatives to consider, if you are looking to advance your technology ecosystem and migrate and/or port workloads for optimum flexibility and Return on Investment (ROI). It is evident the traditional “lift and shift strategy” does not provide this level of value to the consumer. Instead, the above “on-demand cloud plays” may not be realised, with inefficient cloud resource management and unexpected expenses, leading to increased OPEX and TCO. By embracing these top cloud plays, it enables businesses investing in innovation to develop and deploy applications that can scale seamlessly on Cloud, adapting to changing customer demands, reduce TCO/ OPEX, accelerate time-to-market, maintain high availability and security, while future proofing themselves in this competitive digital landscape. For more information about Cloud, Cloud-Native, Data Analytics and more, visit our services page.
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Cloud-Native, Data & AI, DevSecOps
Progressive Delivery (the GitOps way) with Kubernetes: One of the biggest challenges organisations faces, especially when running microservices, is managing application deployments. Having a proper deployment strategy is necessary. For instance, in a production environment, it is always a change management process requirement to ensure that the downtime impact on the end-user is minimised and maintenance windows need to be planned to cater for any changes that will cause an outage. It is also mandated that in case of any issues when deploying the change, a rollback plan must be ready for execution to recover from any failures. These challenges amplify with the increase of the number of microservices and makes it more difficult to assess the result of the deployment and execute the rollback if required. Enter progressive delivery. Thankfully, cloud native architectures using Kubernetes running microservices addresses this problem by offering increased flexibility, allowing teams to publish more useful updates more frequently and progressively. The use of release techniques like Canary, Blue-Green, and Feature flagging as part of progressive delivery enables teams to maximise an enterprise’s software delivery. It is predicated on the notion that consumers desire to test features prior to completion to enhance the user experience. In Kubernetes, there are different ways to release an application. It is necessary to choose the right strategy to make the infrastructure reliable and more resilient during an application deployment or update. The out of the box Kubernetes Deployment Object supports the Rolling Update strategy which comes as a standard and provides a basic set of safety guarantees (aka. readiness probes) during an update. When deploying into a development/staging environment, standard Kubernetes deployment strategies such as a recreate or rolling deployment might be a good option. However, the rolling update strategy faces may limitations such as controlling the speed and flow of the rollout. in large scale high-volume production environments, a rolling update is often considered too risky of an update procedure since it provides no control over the blast radius, may rollout too aggressively, and provides no automated rollback upon failures. In production environments, more advanced deployment strategies are much needed to satisfy the business requirements. These advanced strategies are called “Progressive Deployments”. An example of these deployment strategies is the Blue/Green deployment which allows for a quick transition between the old version and the new version by deploying them side by side and then switching to the new version when testing has been successful. This testing of the platform needs to be thorough to avoid having to rollback frequently. If unsure of the platform’s stability or the potential effects of releasing a new software version, a canary deployment offers a smaller scale next version of the release running side by side the current version in production. By doing so, the new release is rolled-out to a small subset of users to test the application and provide their feedback. Once the change is accepted, it is rolled out to the rest of the users. Benefits of Progressive Delivery: Progressive delivery lowers the risk of releasing new features, as well as identifying and resolving possible issues with those additions. It also offers early feedback on any version of your application. Before a feature is fully deployed, the developer can test out various changes on the product to see how the application behaves. The idea is that the developer can alter the release strategy if the modifications are unfavourable to prevent end users from experiencing any glitches. Secondly, improved release frequency results from sequential delivery. While the primary goal of progressive delivery is to provide end users with safer, more dependable releases, you as the DevOps team will benefit from being able to deploy new versions in smaller parts and hence release more frequently. You can work on each feature separately and release it in tiny sprints. The time to market is shortened, and any DevOps team can now deploy better software more quickly. Finally, and this is something that is frequently ignored, progressive delivery leads to improved segregation of duties between the development and operations teams. This segregation of duties works better with progressive delivery since developers concentrate on creating new features while operations concentrate on rolling out the new features gradually in a strategy that suits the operational needs of the platform. Progressive delivery is best achieved with GitOps: This demand for progressive delivery in a cloud native manner can be achieved with GitOps. The objective behind GitOps is to define and declare everything in Git including operational tasks. Git is already used by developers to generate and collaborate on code. GitOps simply expands this concept to include the creation and setup of infrastructure as well. Git becomes the control plane for operations and deployments because everything is declared as code in Git. GitOps is being enabled by open-source tooling such as ArgoCD, Flux and Flagger, which automatically checks Git repositories for any new changes, and if it detects a change, it automatically deploys it to production. With progressive delivery, these automated deployments need to be done in phases and to multiple target Kubernetes clusters. These tools offer full control of the software delivery pipeline, rollback strategies, test executions, feature releases, and scaling of infrastructure resources. In conclusion, there are various methods for deploying an application to cater for applications with varying complexities, teams with different demands, and environments with different operational requirements and compliance levels. Selecting the right strategy or strategies and having full control over these strategies in code when combined by the right tools is an extremely powerful feature of cloud native platforms that greatly simplifies change management, release management, and operations of the applications. It completely disrupts the way operations teams traditionally thought of these processes as rigid and extremely sensitive with a dramatic business impact in case anything went wrong, into simplified processes and tasks that can be executed every day in the background without having an impact on the end-user.
Progressive Delivery with Kubernetes: Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
What is Cloud Transformation? What is cloud transformation? In today’s world, cloud is the first option for everyone to run their workloads, unless they have a compelling reason such as compliance or security concerns to deploy it on-premises. Most of the organisations who manages their workloads on their own data centres, are looking for an opportunity to move to the cloud for numerous benefits which most of the cloud services providers offer. As per the recent survey by Forbes and Gartner recently increased prior forecasts of worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services to anticipate a 23.1% jump this year, followed by a more than 16% increase in 2022 — up from $270 billion in 2020 to just under $400 billion. While the acceleration of cloud transformations continuous, most businesses data still reside on on-premises. Consequently, hybrid solutions that were once downplayed by virtualisation have emerged as not only practical but likely a preferred approach. We’ve moved past the “cloud-first” era to a time when clouds are becoming omnipresent. There are numerous benefits in using cloud services. Some of key benefits are discussed below; Pay per use: Switching from the on-premises IT infrastructure to remote cloud infrastructure provided by a third-party cloud provider allows businesses to make potentially significant cost savings in their IT expenditure. Disaster Recovery: Cloud computing ensures that disaster recovery is much easier than it might otherwise be. This is because critical data is stored off-site in third-party data centres, thereby making it easier to retrieve in the event of unscheduled downtime. Scalable: As your business grows, so is your infrastructure needs. Alternatively, it may be that you’ve had to scale down your operation, and with it your IT compute and storage needs. Cloud computing provides easy scalability, allowing you to scale up and scale down as your circumstances change. Less maintenance: By adopting cloud, businesses can free up the resources (including both financial and human resources) for deployment in other areas. This allows them to have more focus on customer base, rather than managing and maintaining their own IT resources. Security: Data security has been one of the key aspects to be considered when migrating into cloud. cloud providers go to great lengths to ensure that data is kept secure. They are tasked with protecting data from threats and unauthorized access, and this is something they do very effectively using robust encryption. Because of these obvious reasons and much more benefits, many businesses are starting their journey to move or transform their applications or workloads to the cloud and this process of migrating or transforming the applications or workload is called as “Cloud Transformation” What is Cloud Transformation? Cloud transformation is simply the process of migrating or transforming your work to the cloud, including migration of apps, software programs, desktops, data, or an entire infrastructure in alignment with the business objectives of the organization The first step in performing the transformation is to do a comprehensive assessment if the cloud computing is suitable for our organisation from a long-term business strategy. Cloud transformation is popular because, among many other benefits, it increases the efficiency of sharing and storing data, accelerated time-to-market, enhanced organizational flexibility and scalability, and centralize their network security. Overall, it hugely changes the way of operating a business. How to Approach Cloud Transformation? As state above cloud transformation is the enablement of a complete business transformation. To achieve this, organizations focus on cloud strategy, migration, management and optimization, data and analytics, and cloud security to become more competitive and resilient. There are various ways the transformation to the cloud can be done but you may need to choose the option that better suits your organisation and its goals. A few options listed below will help you to consider the right options for the transformation approach. Understanding the Organisation long term goals and environment Security and regulatory considerations Building a cloud transformation strategy and roadmap Choosing the right cloud and approach Defining a Robust Governance model Layers of Cloud transformation All or any of the below component layers are to be changed as a part of transformation when migrating to the cloud. Application layer It is the core layer where your application is hosted to run. It is also known as compute layer to run application code which performs business operations. Along with application code base, it also contains dependencies and software packages which are required to run your application. Data layer It consists of data which are processed by the application layer. This is the layer which maintains the state of your application. Storage (Files, Databases, stage management tools) is the key components of this layer. Network layer It consists of network components like LAN, router, load balancers, firewalls, and VPN etc. It is responsible for providing the segregation between different components and ensure restriction is applied between them as needed. Security layer Though it is mentioned as a separate layer, it will be part of each other layer mentioned above. For e.g., when migrating application layer, we will not be just migrating it but will be considering proper security in place by having security rules (firewall rules) in place and only the required traffic is allowed from and to the application. It applies for data and network layer as well. Types of Cloud transformation Distinct types of cloud transformation are listed and discussed below, Lift & shift (or) Re-hosting Re-platform Re-factor (or) Re-architect Develop in cloud Lift & Shift (or) Re-hosting This approach is nothing but lifting the application from on-prem and deployed to the cloud as-is. This is one of the quickest ways to transform the application from on-premises to the cloud but will not utilize the benefits of cloud-native features. The applications which do not have dependencies with on-premises and have less business impact are the ideal candidates for this approach. It is a way to start your cloud journey with smaller applications and then progress to a bigger one. Application layer – No change Data layer – No
What is Cloud Transformation? Read More »
Cloud-Native, DevSecOps
Unlocking The Potential of Tanzu Application Platform (TAP – a Multicloud, Portable Kubernetes PaaS) Cloud-native application architecture targets building and running software applications that triumph the flexibility, scalability, and resilience of cloud computing by following the 12 factors, microservices architecture with self-service agile infrastructure offering an API based collaborative and self-healing system. Cloud-native encompasses the various tools and techniques used by software developers today to build applications for the public cloud. Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration to build the Cloud Native applications. Undoubtedly Kubernetes is changing the way enterprises manages their infrastructure and application deployments. However, at the core, there is still a clean separation of concerns between the developers and operators. Now comes the new VMWare’s Tanzu Application Platform under the Tanzu Portfolio to address some of the fundamental issues with the developer and operations collaboration issues and provides an effortless path to application deployments in a secure, module, scalable in a portable Kubernetes environment. What is Tanzu Application Platform (TAP)? “A superior multi-cloud developer experience on Kubernetes VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that provides a rich set of developer tooling and a prepared path to production to build and deploy software quickly and securely on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.” By VMWare Tanzu Application Platform simplifies workflows Tanzu Application Platform simplifies workflows in both the inner loop and outer loop of cloud-native application development and deployments on Kubernetes. A typical inner loop consists of developers writing the code in their local IDE (Integrated development environment), testing, and debugging the application, push and pull the code from a soured code repository, deploying to a development or staging environment, and then making additional code changes based on the continuous feedback. An outer loop consists of the steps to deploy the application to a non-production /production environment and support them over time. In the instance of a cloud-native platform, the outer loop includes activities such as building container images, adding container security, i.e., vulnerability scanning, trust and adding signature and configuring continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. TAP creates an abstraction layer above the underlying Kubernetes, focusing on portability and reproducibility, avoiding lock-in where possible. Underneath, TAP provides strong support with all the tools required for the build and deployment of the applications in the form of Accelerators and Supply chains Choreographers. TAP can be installed and managed on most of the managed Kubernetes instances like AKS(Azure), EKS(AWS) and GKE (Google Cloud) available in the market as well as any other unmanaged conformant Kubernetes cluster. Developers can even install it on their local Minikube instance as well. TAP also supports an out of the box workflow for DevSecOps based on the best open-source tools. However, there is strong support to customise these workflows with the enterprise-grade/commercial tools of choice. TL Consulting TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as If you need assistance with your Containers/Kubernetes adoption, please contact us at our kubernetes consulting services page.
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Cloud-Native, DevSecOps, Uncategorised
How to Optimise Kubernetes Costs? The increasing popularity of cloud-native applications has brought technologies like microservices and containers to the frontline. Kubernetes is the most preferred container orchestration platform by most enterprises for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containers. Most of the Kubernetes implementations thrive to focus on technical aspects and are least bothered by the costs involved with their benefits. In a recent survey from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), 68% of participants reported that their Kubernetes costs increased in the past year, with bills surging more than 20% year-on-year for most organisations. So, how to optimise Kubernetes costs? How much has your Kubernetes-related spend grown in the last 12 months? Source: FinOps Foundation survey When looking at optimising the infrastructure costs, enterprises consider various cost-management best practices, but Kubernetes require a specialised approach. Here we will discuss some of the key aspects to reduce overall Kubernetes costs. Size of the infrastructure as per the need: First and foremost, reducing the consumption costs is to have the correct infrastructure size in terms of pods and nodes. While it is always advisable to overprovision to cater to the unusual spikes, leaving the applications to use unlimited resources can lead to unexpected repercussions. For instance, a stateful database container consumes all the available memory in the node due to an application fault; this leads other pods to wait indefinitely for the resources. This can be prevented by setting up Quotas at Pod and namespace levels. Additionally, it is good to enforce the resource request limits at a container level. Other enforcement is to limit the number of pods running on a node, as running many pods can lead to inefficient resource utilisation. Due to this issue, most cloud providers have set hard limits on their managed instances if Kubernetes. Choosing the right tools: A fundamental way of managing any cloud or infrastructure costs is by monitoring utilisation and costs involved for the resources over a period. It allows users to get better insights into storage, memory, computing, network traffic utilisation, etc, and how the costs associated are distributed between them. Irrespective of managed instances or bare-metal clusters, today, almost all the clusters support one or other tools for monitoring to get the basic information. Suppose we are looking at an enterprise with many clusters. In that case, it is always advisable to have a propriety APIM tooling like Dynatrace, New Relic, App D, Splunk, and Prometheus and so have a proper drill-down of the resources and utilisation. It enables SREs and Kubernetes admins to gain a more comprehensive view of the environment and optimise the costs. Use the monitoring insights to analyse and create actions. And start implementing more concrete actions for better utilisation and cost optimisation. Adopting the Best Practices Across the Delivery Pipeline: DevOps is a proven practice which helps to reduce the barriers between the Development teams and Operations. It allowed users to create robust and flexible deployments through pipelines. One of the possibility of reducing the time and effort to deploy containers to the Kubernetes cluster is to automate the build and deployment pipelines using CI/CD tooling. Also, practices like GitOps are tailor-made to facilitate continuous delivery when manifests are used and version-controlled in a source code repository, greatly reducing the deployment workloads of the team. An Initial investment will be needed to set up a continuous integration to build, test, and publish containers and continuous delivery to deploy these containers on the cluster. Tools like Harness Argo CD will significantly reduce the manual errors that can cause disruptions in the application, leading to less troubleshooting. This reduced workload will allow teams to focus on more valuable tasks such as functionality development, bug fixes, and improving the security posture of the environment. Conclusion: Kubernetes deployments and operations can be very costly if implemented and managed inefficiently. Most enterprises incorporate Kubernetes without any proper practices, tooling, and personal experience in the organisation. However, without proper guidance, it is often will become unoptimised and businesses don’t think about expenses forefront and will be a heavy operational burden in the long run. Considering the above-mentioned practices could save a lot of unnecessary Kubernetes costs and encourage the implementation of best practices from the beginning. TL Consulting TLConsulting brings its consulting and engineering personnel to application modernisation adoption and implementation by providing range of services – as If you need assistance with your Containers/Kubernetes adoption, please contact us at our kubernetes consulting services page.
How to Optimise Kubernetes Costs? Read More »
Uncategorised
How do Kubernetes and Containers Help Your Enterprise? In today’s world success of any organisation heavily depends on its ability to drive innovation and deliver those at speed. And IT being an enabler for this rapid delivery model, businesses are looking at Kubernetes and containers adoption as an essential piece of technology for building, deploying, and managing their modern applications at scale. Containers provide an abstraction to the underlying applications and drive towards portability, making it possible to run anywhere, across multiple clouds and on-premises data centres. Furthermore, by providing uniform deployment, management, scaling, and availability services for all the applications, irrespective of its technology—Kubernetes offers significant advantages for your IT and development efforts. Kubernetes offers a range of benefits to the various levels of executives and developers; here we will discuss some of those key advantages. Ultimate Need of Containers and Kubernetes: Keeping up with the latest technology trends and organisational goals towards digitalisation is very tough for the IT teams for the last few years. Conventional software models, traditional VM based IT infrastructure will not be able to help in delivering these modern applications at scale. To deliver these new-age applications, one should adopt the new software practices such as agile and DevOps practices alone with cloud-native architecture. Containers and Kubernetes are the 2 key building blocks in the cloud-native architecture, which the organisations widely use to deliver faster, reliable, and efficient software with a significant cost reduction in the application life cycle. Key Advantages: Light Weight: Containers are very lightweight when compared with traditional virtual machines. A Container includes everything it needs to run, including its operation system, dependencies, libraries, and code. Multiple containers can run inside a single node of a cluster; the VM hosts the OS and container runtime, and the team can still take advantage of all the capabilities of traditional infrastructure virtualisation. Speed: Due to its lightweight nature, we can create a container image and deploy a container in a matter of seconds. Once the image is ready, it can quickly replicate containers and easily and quickly deploy as needed. Destroying a container is also a matter of seconds. This also helps with quicker development cycles and operational tasks. Portability: Containers can run anywhere if the container engine supports the underlying operating system—it is possible to run containers on Linux, Windows, MacOS, and many other operating systems. Containers can run in virtual machines, on bare metal servers, locally on a developer’s laptop and all major public clouds. They can easily be moved between on-premises machines and public cloud, and across all these environments, continue to work consistently. As per RedHat’s market dynamics report, please see how organisations benefit from containers and Kubernetes adoption. Kubernetes for ‘everyone’ Kubernetes is well known for supporting the automation of configuring, deploying, and scaling microservice-based applications that are implemented using containers. Also, microservices-based applications orchestrated by Kubernetes are highly automated in their deployment and management, as well as their maintenance, so that it’s possible to create applications that are highly responsive and adaptive to spikes in network traffic and needs for other resources. It offers significant advantages to all IT executives and developers as below. Biggest Barriers for Kubernetes Adoption: Cost Of Adoption: One of the biggest obstacles to wider Kubernetes (K8s) adoption is deriving the cost of adoption and running the workloads in the Kubernetes clusters. Cost is the key factor for executives to make decisions to leverage the Kubernetes in their enterprise. In a recent FinOps Foundation survey , — 75% of whom reported having Kubernetes in production — highlights Kubernetes cost management difficulties. It revealed that spending on Kubernetes is spiking beyond what deployments should likely require. The survey’s subtitle isn’t exactly subtle: “Insufficient — or non-existent — Kubernetes cost monitoring is causing overspend.” Lack of Skills and Training: Another barrier for adoption is the lack of skilled and experienced personnel on containerisation and orchestration. As a result, although Kubernetes and container adoption is growing rapidly, many organisations still face a steep learning curve to effectively build, deploy, and manage Kubernetes. This is due to both the technology’s immaturity and a lack of operational excellence with it. Organisations are trying various approaches like paired programming, partners, education, and training to overcome this barrier. Visibility and monitoring: Enterprises are deploying Kubernetes clusters spanning across multiple public clouds and /or in their traditional virtualisation data centres or managed services introduce an increasing amount of complexity. To realise the greatest benefits from, organisations need to be able to visualise their entire Kubernetes footprint, including all its workloads (applications, containers, pods, nodes, namespaces, etc.), their dependencies, how they interact with each other in terms of network bandwidths, response times, and memory utilisations for cluster management and optimisation. Security and Compliance: While enterprises give priority to speed in software delivery, security and compliance sometimes are just an afterthought. Security is a major challenge in the container world, just as it has almost everywhere else in IT. Although many changes and innovations so far, security is still not on par with the traditional structure models. Due to the unique nature of Kubernetes and containerized environments, one misconfiguration can be easily multi-folded to many containers. A security breach of a container is almost identical to an operating system-level breach of a virtual machine in terms of potential application and system vulnerability. How to overcome these challenges: Many organizations want to adopt and leverage the benefits of containers but struggle to justify the total time, resources, and cost needed to develop and manage it internally. One approach is to use VMware Tanzu to organize their Kubernetes clusters across all their environments, set policies governing access and usage permissions, and enable their teams to deploy Kubernetes clusters in a self-service manner. This enables infrastructure and operations teams to gain visibility and command of their Kubernetes footprint while still empowering developers to use those resources with a focus on delivering solutions rather than worrying about infrastructure. Bottom Line: Evidently, Kubernetes adoption helps drive innovation and rapid software development with reliability
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Uncategorised