Kubernetes, managing the future
December 19, 2018
Kubernetes, managing the future
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Kubernetes
We use Kubernetes at a department level and across the whole organization. At a department level, we use Kubernetes to manage our developer environments. These environments are made up of 30 containers containing compilers, single sign-on managers, and various other linting tools. We selected Kubernetes to manage these containers because it's quick to deploy and immensely customizable. Across the organization, we use Kubernetes to manage our customer environments. These environments are made up of ~8 containers running various managed web services. Kubernetes was selected for this because it is open source, scalable, and reliable. This allows us to cost-effectively deploy a solution and be confident that it will perform as needed.
- Cost-effectiveness, Kubernetes is free and open source.
- Scalability, Kubernetes works regardless of how many pods it's managing; be it ten or a thousand.
- Low overhead, Kubernetes adds very little performance cost per developer per machine. The benefits of having a managed system vastly outweigh the minor performance cost.
- Large market share, Kubernetes is one of the top container orchestration tools used by developers today. This has been immensely helpful when finding new talent who are familiar with Kubernetes.
- Local development, Kubernetes does tend to be a bit complicated and unnecessary in environments where all development is done locally.
- The need for add-ons, Helm is almost required when running Kubernetes. This brings a whole new tool to manage and learn before a developer can really start to use Kubernetes effectively.
- Finicy configmap schemes. Kubernetes configmaps often have environment breaking hangups. The fail safes surrounding configmaps are sadly lacking.
- Low initial cost, Kubernetes is one of the top orchestration tools on the market right now. This has reduced costs across our organization as a new talent with skills in Kubernetes are not hard to find.
- No software cost, Kubernetes is free and open source.
- Reduced system complexity, developers spend fewer hours configuring Kubernetes and more hours working and solving problems.
When planning our latest product we tried out many hosted container service and a few local tools. These included services run by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon and tools from companies like Docker and Apache. We ended up selecting Kubernetes because it was compatible with all the hosted options, was open source, and had a strong lineage. Going forward Kubernetes allows us to connect with many hosted sources, this is important because it gives us more options as we develop new code. We also value the open quality of the code because it allows us to tool Kubernetes for each customer as needed. Finally, we selected Kubernetes because of its lineage, it was initially developed by a rockstar team at Google and is now in the hands of the Open Contained Initiative. This means we don't have to worry about the health of Kubernetes as time goes on, it's in good hands.