Good container orchestration platform from IBM
Updated January 14, 2022

Good container orchestration platform from IBM

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is being used by a department. We run different backend microservices in it to serve our consumers. It is adopted to ease the management of containers in the cloud. Since it's a managed service, we don't need to spend much effort from an operation perspective.
  • Support different regions and zones
  • Easy for provisioning
  • Easy to scale
  • Monitoring has room for improvement.
  • Cluster identity with random IDs are difficult to memorize.
  • Reduce the human cost for managing Kubernetes.
  • Cheaper than setting up in our own data centers.
We mostly use Kube CLI to interact with Kubernetes. IBM CLI is only used for granting access to the cluster. The GUI is nice to monitor the workload in the cluster. However, since we try to automate monitoring and alerting, we don't use the GUI that often.
  • IBM Cloud Functions
  • IBM Cloud Object Storage
  • IBM Cloud Databases
  • IBM Db2 on Cloud
  • IBM Lift
  • IBM Watson IoT
By using multiple IBM Cloud products, we managed to focus on our own business applications development, while leaving the infrastructure and operations work to the cloud.
It provides both GUI and CLI support. It's easy to provision, use, and operate.
Since we already use different IBM Cloud services, we don't want to move the Kubernetes service to another provider. That will increase the complexity.
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is well suited to run microservices workload that requires high availability, scaling, with good performance. Combined with other IBM Cloud services (e.g. API Connect), it's very easy to set up a working environment in a short while. Comparing with other cloud providers, IBM seems to have fewer locations. If your service wants to be deployed closer to the end-users, it's worth checking out the available locations.

Using IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

30 - We have two teams using IBM Kubernetes: backend team and ops team. Backend team work on the microservices for our consumer services, and they are deployed into IBM Kubernetes clusters. Ops team is managing the Kubernetes clusters, providing the necessary administration and maintenance.
5 - We have SRE team providing the support. It requires different skills like infrastructure automation, capacity planning, monitoring, troubleshooting, disaster recovery, etc.
  • container orchestration
  • job scheduling
  • autoscaling
  • We have looked into multi-region clusters for better availability and performance
  • Move more on-prem services into Kubernetes
  • Use Kubernetes to run ad-hoc jobs

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Training

Good examples to understand Kubernetes and very detailed step-by-step documentation to follow.