Why Managed Kubernetes as a Service Should Be a Part of Your DevOps Strategy

Kubernetes is a container-orchestration system that allows the automation of computer application deployment, management, and even scaling. This open-source system gives DevOps teams the ability to deploy highly functional distributed applications in response to customer-specific demand, without having to be concerned about the underlying infrastructure. In this article, we take a look at why Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) should be a part of your DevOps strategy.

Deploying Kubernetes itself is complex and can be costly, especially for enterprise-level operations. Dealing with all the elements of distributed applications, architectures, and inter-service communication is complex on its own, let alone adding Kubernetes to the mix. What’s more? The Kubernetes learning curve is extremely steep. Those new to Kubernetes will need to learn a whole new set of terms, architectural patterns, and concepts before they can begin to deploy applications to it. 

There are two ways in which Kubernetes can be deployed:

• Set up and manage clusters on your own
• Use Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) 

Self-managed Kubernetes

Deploying Kubernetes on your own can be challenging, especially if you do not have the in-house expertise or dedicated staff. To set up your Kubernetes environment, you will need to employ staff that possesses the right skills. This system requires experts that are experienced and able to carry out backup, recovery, patches, and upgrades to most of the components of Kubernetes. In-house personnel would only be able to declare configurations and set up instructions and desired pod states using the Kubernetes dashboard. Diagnosing errors that occur during these processes can only be done by an engineer who is skilled and experienced. 

Additionally, organizations setting up their own Kubernetes environment will need to be proficient in more than just Kubernetes–they will require knowledge of other solutions such as distributed data stores and managing multiple containers. Even though Kubernetes would aid in solving numerous container management challenges, you would still be required to configure your automation tools such as load balancers, besides manually configuring computing resources for each container hosting pod.

Debugging Kubernetes requires the addition of an observability tool. You will also need to work with tools for setting up your CI/CD pipeline, including monitoring, self-recovery, logging, tracing, dashboards, database integration, and message queuing systems, before your developers can even begin deploying applications to the system. To make it more complex, there is more than one add-on tool for practically every feature of a successfully operating Kubernetes environment. Choosing among these is up to your team, which is especially hard if they are inexperienced in handling Kubernetes. 

While building a solution in-house may be cheaper than using KaaS, making the wrong choices when building your Kubernetes deployment system can negatively impact future application availability, performance, and agility. Your design could have flaws that may only become evident once the system is in production. For example, you might later find that you have over-provisioned resources to support a maximum anticipated workload, causing increased spending on the cloud and wasted space on owned hardware.

Learn More: Kubernetes-as-a-Service Lightens Load for IT Departments

Using Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS)

Using a managed Kubernetes service, you can achieve the benefits of faster application deployment without placing the responsibility of Kubernetes deployment on your developers or operations team. The turnkey aspect of KaaS would enable your organization to start building apps quickly and securely. 

KaaS is a third-party managed platform that handles the responsibility of a part or all the work needed for successfully operating and managing Kubernetes, which includes migration of workloads to Kubernetes and the deployment and management of clusters. Employing the services of a third-party provider ensures that the Kubernetes environment is highly available, resilient, flexible, up-to-date, secure, and efficient. 

KaaS would provide all the benefits of Kubernetes, with the KaaS vendor managing some or all of the configuration, deployment, and maintenance of the Kubernetes platform. KaaS includes monitoring and SLAs to ensure your deployments are secure and remain operational at all times. 

Following are the components of Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS): 

CI/CD Tools

A complete Kubernetes environment requires integrating several continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools. The KaaS service provider will set up the CI/CD pipeline and additional tooling to simplify functions such as monitoring and reporting. This would make the implementation suit your needs as required. 

Learn More: VMware Launches New Apps to Simplify Kubernetes Adoption

Key Component Setup

The KaaS platform will guide you through the manual configuration of key components that are needed to set up a complete Kubernetes environment, including processes such as progressive application deployment, workload management, batch execution, and scalability. KaaS comes with automation tools that can handle node setup, configuring nodes into a cluster and replacing faulty nodes when a failure occurs. KaaS automation reduces the time to deploy clusters and makes it easier to scale infrastructure at any given point to any level. Some vendors even provide additional facilities for setting up storage, networking, and logging. 

Managed Component Updates

To ensure that hosts run the most current operating system patches and container runtime versions, in-house developers in a self-managed Kubernetes environment need to spend a great deal of time on new host deployment, node lifecycle management, host updates, and troubleshooting and monitoring. This leaves them with less time for application development. KaaS facilitates faster application releases by taking over these management and monitoring tasks from developers.  

Security Protection

Self-managed Kubernetes implementations can expose API servers to the internet, leaving them unprotected from any possible security threat. KaaS ensures a security policy-based user management system that lets business requirements determine user infrastructure access. The managed Kubernetes provider will take care of fixes, security upgrades, and security patches. 

Centralized Control

With KaaS, administrators can manage Kubernetes clusters from a single UI terminal, facilitating the continuous monitoring of contents/components of all the clusters. 

Learn More: How Automated Kubernetes Audit Log Monitoring Can Harden Container Security

KaaS or Self-managed Kubernetes?

Now comes the question about choosing KaaS or self-managed Kubernetes! This depends on a few things, such as how much Kubernetes expertise your team has, how fast you need to get your clusters up and running, and how important it is for you to have full control over how your clusters are designed and configured.

In case of a self-managed Kubernetes environment, you would possess the ability to design your clusters as per your requirements. Going in for a managed approach would mean that you would be limited to whatever infrastructure options and integrations are supported by the vendor’s platform. Such limitations could make it seem like KaaS is cost-prohibitive in terms of direct costs. However, these costs need to be compared with the indirect costs of your staff and the time spent managing clusters. Also, with the current shortage of talent in this area of work, you will need to invest heavily in training on the technology. Therefore, it can be safely concluded that KaaS is a cost-effective solution for organizations that are small in size and do not possess the expertise required to configure and manage Kubernetes in-house. 

There are a number of vendors in the KaaS space. Leading KaaS vendors include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Platform9, IBM, and OpenShift. However, not all managed Kubernetes services are alike. Amazon EKS and Microsoft Azure AKS mostly manage the infrastructure layer of a Kubernetes environment. Platform9 comes with more management features, but these are less tightly integrated with specific public clouds. Your platform provider would need to work with the cloud provider of your choice, as well as hybrid environments, in case the need arises. KaaS providers should be able to take care of app portability across both, private clouds and public clouds, and also the sharing of existing apps in multi-cloud environments.

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