Kubernetes -Case study
What is Kubernetes ?
Kubernetes is an open source orchestration tool allowing you to run and manage you container based workloads. Kubernetes (sometimes shortened to K8s with the 8 standing for the number of letters between the “K” and the “s”) is an open-source system to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications anywhere.
Why use Kubernetes ?
- Deployment: Deploy a specified number of containers to a specified host and keep them running in a desired state.
- Rollouts: A rollout is a change to a deployment. Kubernetes lets you initiate, pause, resume, or roll back rollouts.
- Service discovery: Kubernetes can automatically expose a container to the internet or to other containers using a DNS name or IP address.
- Storage provisioning: Set Kubernetes to mount persistent local or cloud storage for your containers as needed.
- Load balancing and scaling: When traffic to a container spikes, Kubernetes can employ load balancing and scaling to distribute it across the network to maintain stability.
- Self-healing for high availability: When a container fails, Kubernetes can restart or replace it automatically; it can also take down containers that don’t meet your health-check requirements.
Kubernetes Architecture :-
Clusters and nodes (compute): Clusters are the building blocks of Kubernetes architecture. The clusters are made up of nodes, each of which represents a single compute host (virtual or physical machine).
Each cluster consists of multiple worker nodes that deploy, run, and manage containerized applications and one master node that controls and monitors the worker nodes.
The master node runs a scheduler service that automates when and where the containers are deployed based on developer-set deployment requirements and available computing capacity. Each worker node includes the tool that is being used to manage the containers — such as Docker — and a software agent called a Kubelet that receives and executes orders from the master node.
CASE STUDY : SPOTIFY
Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video streaming service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from artists all over the world.
“We saw the amazing community that’s grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that. We wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools.”
— JAI CHAKRABARTI, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS, SPOTIFY
Challenge
Launched in 2008, the audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. “Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today — and hopefully the consumers we’ll have in the future,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations. An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. By late 2017, it became clear that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,” he says.
Solution
“We saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that,” says Chakrabarti. Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Plus, “we wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools.” At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence in the flourishing Kubernetes community. The migration, which would happen in parallel with Helios running, could go smoothly because “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios,” says Chakrabarti.
Impact
The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for a migration, which started late that year and is a big focus for 2019. “A small percentage of our fleet has been migrated to Kubernetes, and some of the things that we’ve heard from our internal teams are that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” says Chakrabarti. The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from auto scaling, says Site Reliability Engineer James Wen. Plus, he adds, “Before, teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes.” In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold.
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