A New Approach to K8s and Containers

Kubernetes is the linchpin of the enterprise container platform and central to the digital transformation strategies of many enterprises. It is the de facto standard for addressing and automating modern applications in production. Kubernetes allows container-based applications to self-heal, increasing uptime without adding work to the operator’s day.

However, the digital transformation initiatives of many enterprises and organizations are being seriously impeded by people, process and technology factors associated with starting out, standing up, running and maintaining Kubernetes.  A survey of 400 developers and DevOps team members in the U.S. and Europe found “a full 95% of respondents using Kubernetes have faced challenges after rolling it out, including training and onboarding (37%) or complexity of setup/configuration (35%).”

Proper care and maintenance of Kubernetes is important to an organization’s entire ecosystem, as DevOps consultant Risto Laurikainen says in his blog, Why you need a platform team for Kubernetes. “Kubernetes … outages have a broader impact and might impair your operations significantly.”

Management complexity issues arise from the multiple, interrelated problems of culture barriers, technical problems with current Kubernetes solutions and problems with adopting and integrating it with Agile, DevOps, QA, DevSecOps and SRE frameworks for the many disparate applications and CI/CD pipelines found in enterprises.

Do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches to Kubernetes, in which an organization designs, builds and operates container platforms themselves, are flexible but demand high levels of operational overhead, cognitive load, complexity and maintenance of integrations between tools in the toolchain.

Kubernetes managed services approaches, which provide hosted commercial services, make it easy to get started. However, these services are not as flexible because they rely heavily on standardization, which may not fit an organization’s continuously evolving requirements, often involve some vendor-specific form of lock-in and still require some DIY work.

A New Approach to Kubernetes is Needed

An enterprise Kubernetes-based containers platform is a new, preferred approach in which Kubernetes is built into a comprehensive flexible platform with the complexities of requirements engineered into the solution. According to a white paper from Red Kubes, “an Enterprise container platform is a platform for developing and running cloud-native applications, and it’s so much more than just Kubernetes, the container scheduler. It includes many solutions to manage container-based applications in production, and includes services for the development of these applications, too.”

This approach balances the freedom and flexibility of DIY with the simplicity of using a product. It is the best of both worlds. This approach provides a simple turn-key solution that helps you get started quickly by completely removing the complexity of design and implementation. A single deployment package takes care of the entire installation of all components with sane, secure defaults, enterprise-grade scaling and functionality.

The enterprise Kubernetes-based container platform is deployed on a customer’s cluster, so the customer is still in control of upgrades. This removes the operational downsides of being at the mercy of a service provider for life cycle management. This supports mix-and-match clusters across on-premises, hosted environments and the public cloud. It also reduces dependency on third parties, reduces cost and increases deployment options for specific use cases. It allows for deployment on the most cost-efficient cloud, or closest to your SaaS data or even close to your existing on-premises data center assets.

What This Means

The importance of Kubernetes to enterprise digital transformation strategies is clear. However, complexity and resources requirements for standing up, running and maintaining it are bottlenecking progress. Traditional DIY and managed Kubernetes services are not enough to provide flexibility and speed and reduce costs. A new kind of enterprise Kubernetes-based container platform is needed to accelerate time-to-value and realize efficient, safe operation of containers and Kubernetes for enterprises.

Marc Hornbeek

Marc Hornbeek, a.k.a., DevOps-the-Gray esq. is a globally recognized expert for DevOps, DevSecOps, Continuous Testing and SRE. He is CEO and Principal Consultant at Engineering DevOps Consulting , author of the book "Engineering DevOps", and Ambassador and Author for The DevOps Institute . Marc applies his unique, comprehensive Engineering Blueprints, Seven-Step DevOps Transformation Blueprint and 9 DevOps Pillars discovery and assessment tools, together with targeted workshops skills to create actionable and comprehensive DevOps transformation roadmaps and strategic plans. Marc is an IEEE Outstanding Engineer, and 45-year IEEE Life member. He is a DevOps leadership advisor/mentor. He is the original author of the Continuous Delivery Ecosystem (CDEF) and Continuous Testing Foundations (CTF) certification courses that are offered by the DevOps Institute. He is a Blogger on DevOps.com and cloudnativenow.com. He is a freelance writer of DevOps content including webinars, and white papers. He is a freelance trainer for DevOps, DevSecOps and SRE courses offered by partners of the DevOps Institute.

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