The modern business can’t rely on ancient technologies. And if you’re wondering what passes for a modern technology these days, chances are you need Aptira – and you need us now. The concept of running your business on anything that isn’t up-to-date should frighten you. It’s time to get out of the danger zone. It’s time to upgrade. It’s time to K8 it.
Container orchestration platforms such as Docker have provided users with greater flexibility when running applications on both virtual infrastructure and physical hardware. They are also extremely lightweight and efficient, meaning your services can easily be packed up, moved between environments and switched between testing and production. However, once your environment starts to grow and involves multiple containers on multiple hosts, things can start to get a little tricky.
This is where Kubernetes comes in. Kubernetes is specifically designed for deploying and managing containerized applications at scale across all major public clouds and private infrastructure. This enables users to operate their own Kubernetes clusters on demand, or easily outsource their Kubernetes operations to orchestration experts – such as Aptira.
Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes is an open-source system – and you know how we feel about open source! Vendor lock-in has been eliminated by providing core capabilities without the typical vendor restrictions which are often imposed on other systems.
Our Solutionauts are Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA), and Aptira has real-world experience creating, configuring and managing several Kubernetes clusters in production environments. Our Solutionauts excel at orchestration, taking developer outputs and putting them into production in a maintainable way.
Kubernetes takes a modular approach to architecture design, allowing for applications to be broken down into many smaller, specialized parts. This approach enables faster development, facilitates the isolation of dependencies and provides greater elasticity for scaling. Aptira can design these smaller, modularized containers to create a well-tuned containerized environment which is tailor made to suit for your specific requirements. The Kubernetes controllers make this infrastructure easy to manage throughout the full life cycle of your application.
With container orchestration, it’s easy to ramp your application up or down to meet the demands of large fluctuations. Software can be deployed in a scale-out manner across multiple pods, and deployments can be scaled in or out at any time. Kubernetes facilitates horizontal autoscaling, automatically scaling up/down the number of pods based on the usage of resources. Users can also pause/resume deployments to save time and resources.
Kubernetes can also automatically orchestrate your storage platform of choice – local or network storage – and provide the provisioned persistent storage to your applications running inside containers.
Auto-Healing: In the case of an application failure, applications can be fixed automatically using Kubernetes auto-healing feature to re-create the pod. When a node or server fails, they will simply be re-deployed on another available node/server.
Canary Deployments: When deploying a new software version, multiple versions can run in parallel. The new version can be used to test the new deployment in production, then the previous version can be scaled down simultaneously.
Rolling Updates: This allow updates to take place with zero downtime, incrementally updating pods and automatically reverting to a previous version when needed.
Kubernetes can be run anywhere, giving users the freedom to take advantage of on-premises, hybrid or public for running your applications. Not only this, containers are more transparent than virtual machines, making monitoring and management of your application even easier. It also simplifies many complex management tasks, including:
Kubernetes also facilitates simpler server maintenance. It provides the application design primitives necessary for end-users (your developers) to define the configuration of their workloads without operator support. Infrastructure operators can focus on deploying mostly homogeneous Kubernetes clusters without needing specialized knowledge of application workloads, saving you time and money.
Unlike many traditional platform-as-a-service offerings, Kubernetes provides much greater flexibility for the types of applications supported. Kubernetes does not restrict application frameworks, supported languages or distinguish services from applications. If an application can run in a container, it should run on Kubernetes, making Kubernetes the container orchestration platform of choice for modern applications.
We also support other Container Orchestration platforms in addition to Kubernetes – including Docker, Cloudify, Kolla-Ansible, Murano and more. Check out our supported technologies or chat with our Solutionauts to find out the best orchestration platform for your requirements.
Don’t just take our word for it. Check out our case studies to see how we have designed, deployed and managed Cloud solutions to meet the most demanding applications.
Prefer to do it yourself? Training from Aptira lets you learn about Kubernetes from instructors with real world expertise. Our trainers are our engineers with experience deploying and operating some of the largest and most complex deployments.
We offer a range of online courses including OpenStack, Docker, Ceph, Puppet, Linux KVM and Linux XEN. We also offer customised and on-site group courses. If your organisation needs to focus on particular technologies, or needs unusual learning outcomes (eg sales/presales enablement, development techniques for cloud native applications) then Aptira can provide you with an unbiased understanding.