Kubernetes Reviews

There are many use cases. It's a concept of microservices-based architecture. You will find that Kubernetes is the most reliable solution. I work for a digital advertising company, for example. When you have advertisements that are served on the top of a website, or a sidebar or something, you fill those spaces with digital advertisements. It's a complete market product, and our end customers are media houses and advertisement agencies.

We are using 600 or 700 or more microservices on microservice-based architecture, and, in order to run the microservices, we use the container-based technique as it is a much more reliable platform. It's more secure due to the use of isolation techniques. Currently, we are running an almost 190 node cluster. That is a very big cluster.

This is how it is used in an advertising context: if there is a cricket game being streamed on a web portal, which has a very high viewership, a lot of companies will want to promote their ads while this particular match is playing. The portal itself is responsible for managing its streaming activity. At the same time, our company is there to display the ads on the sidebars. In such a scenario, where a high volume of people are working on some content and to handle the advertisement from the various media outlets, we need a very good auto-scaling structure. Kubernetes works well for this. At any given point in time, there is a concept for a horizontal port auto scaler based on CCP utilization. Kubernetes itself tries to increase the number of ports, which means it'll try to increase the number of instances, which are running.

Another example of how we use Kubernetes is in a banking environment. In this case, they have an on-prem version. They do not have a cloud solution at all. Occasionally, there is a high volume of transactions happening. They need flexibility. They need high availability and the very beautiful thing about the Kubernetes is that, behind the scenes, these companies are doing their own development of their own applications.

At any given point of time, if version one of the application is currently running in their data centers in form of Kubernetes, it is very easy for them to launch version two. If version one is running, and another version is running slowly, we can divert all the requests, which are coming to version one over to version two. The moment a customer accepts that particular product, we remove version one, and version two is ready. There is no downtime and no complexity. 

The deployment strategy is great. If we look into any other framework, we do not have a good deployment strategy here. The Kubernetes framework itself gives you fantastic deployment strategies with rolling updates. 

We can completely decouple solutions, which means we can scale as much as we want. Technically there are no limitations. The way you can scale up and scale down your cluster with very few commands is amazing.

With the high availability, I can put some intelligence on the top of it. We're capable of handling any type of application nowadays. While there were limitations in previous versions, we don't need to maintain the previous state of the application. The moment our application restarts, we are not required to remember what we have used before. We do not require memory. 

The product is highly scalable. 

Security-wise, there are a lot of frameworks that are available. 

The product offers security, scalability, high availability deployment, and scheduling mechanisms. These are all features that people are passionate about. 

There are a lot of complexities. They're a lot of components that are working together internally. If you look into the installation methods nowadays, it's better, however, previously, it was a very complex process. It's improving. It could still be better. Currently, we do have a very simple method in order to install Kubernetes. 

They need to focus on more security internally. The majority of the security is coming from external frameworks which means I need to deploy a third-party framework to improve the security. For example, there's Notary, OPPI, or KubeCon. Basically, there are some areas where I need to take the help of a third party. 

The solution requires networking dependence. Kubernetes does not have its own networking component. Once again, I need to work with a third party. It is fully integrated, no doubt about that, however, I need to be dependent on third-party components to make it work.  I want Kubernetes to improve security-wise and make their own stack available inside the core Kubernetes engine to make the secure implementation. If they can integrate the networking component inside the core component that would be best. With dependency removed it would give more choice to the customer. 

Currently, they're improving immutable structures and a lot of things. They're coming out with version 1.21 in order to reduce some security issues. They are removing the direct dependency from Docker. There are many areas they're working on. 

A policy enforcement engine is something people are really looking for, which could be part of the four component vertical port auto scaler. A horizontal port auto scaler is already available, however, a vertical port auto scaler should be available. 

If there was a built-in solution for login and a monitoring solution, if they can integrate some APIs or drivers where I can attach directly any monitoring tool, that would be great.  

I've worked with the solution for almost six or seven years. I've worked on this particular product rigorously. Earlier, I used to work with on-premises solutions which involved deploying the Kubernetes cluster with the hardware in a cube spray, which is the latest method.

The performance completely depends on the user. Typically, it's stable. 1.20 is a quite stable product as they have improved in many areas. Currently, that is the one stable version. Technically, yes, they are making their products stable. No doubt about that. That said, stability is an ongoing process. They are trying to improve the product in different areas. 

Performance-wise, it completely depends upon how you define and how you design your cluster. For example, what are the components you are using? How have you made your particular cluster, and under what type of workload? I've worked on medium to large scale workloads, and, if you rate out of five, I'd give it a 4.5. It's got a very good performance.

I would recommend this solution to large enterprises. That said, small enterprises still have very simple options available to them which are reliable and secure. It is very easy to manage. Still, it's more suitable for a large-scale company or maybe something that's in the mid-range, and for a small organization, I do not recommend it.

The scalability is quite impressive in this product.

The major setback of the product is the technical support. They might provide some sort of email support, however, you cannot rely on it. 

You never know when you are going to get the response and unfortunately, when it comes to having a third-party component that you can use to build your Kubernetes cluster, those are also open source, and there is often no technical support, no email support, no chat support. Many have community-based support, which you can depend on. 

This is a major setback for the user. It's the reason customers need to hire a consultant who is rigorously working with the product. In my case, as a consultant, 24/7 I'm using the Kubernetes container and OpenShift. 

Due to the lack of support, other companies take advantage. For example, Red Hat. Red Hat says, they'll give support for Kubernetes, however, you have to use their product, which is called OpenShift. If you look into the OpenShift, OpenShift is basically Kubernetes. There's only one more abstraction layer provided by Red Hat. However, Red Hat will say, I will give you the support, and it's a product made by them, so they know the loopholes. They know the way to troubleshoot it. They know what to debug. They can provide support - if you use them. Rancher is another company that does this. It's basically a Kubernetes product, with Rancher as the abstraction layer, and they will provide support to their clients. Cloud providers also have jumped onto this particular approach. If I get something directly from the Cloud provider and the Cloud provider is taking responsibility, then I don't have to worry about troubleshooting and support at all. What I need to worry about is only my client or workers and my application, which is running on the top of a particular stack. That's it.

Previously, the initial setup was complex however, right now It's pretty simple.

Nowadays, deployment will take ten to 15 minutes, depending upon the number of clusters you want. If I talk about the single master and a simple testing purpose, it's ten to 15 minutes. A multi-master technique will take possibly one hour or maybe less. It's pretty fast. In previous versions, it would take an entire day to deploy. There used to be a lot of dependencies. 

A lot of maintenance is required in terms of image creation. Maintenance is required as well as far as the volume is concerned as space is one of the main challenges. Network support is necessary which means continuous monitoring and log analysis are needed. 

If I set up the cluster as well as operational maintenance activity, I need proactive monitoring and proactive log analysis. I need someone who can manage the users, authorization, and authentication mechanisms. Kubernetes does not have an authorization authentication mechanism. I need to depend on a third-party utility. Sometimes a developer will ask you to create a user and give some provisional space. There are many activities, daily activities, that need to be covered.

In the world of management, Kubernetes does not have its own mechanism. That's why there has to be some administrator who can provide the volume to the Kubernetes administrator and the Kubernetes administrator can decide to whom they give the space. If an application is required, they will try to increase the space. 

I work as a freelancing consultant. I am actually providing consulting for the company, which I work for. I help my end customers who are service providers. I work as an independent consultant for this particular product.

Even though the solution is open-source, one major service we need to pay for is storage. Normally we are using the storage from EMC or NetApps or IBM. These companies created their own stack of provisions and if I want to use their storage for my Kubernetes clusters, these are the license stacks that I need to purchase.

Storage is the major component, as the licensing is based on that. Technically, there's an operating system license, which is something that I need to pay by default for every node, that I'm using. Other than that, with any other framework now, OPPA is completely free. Calico is completely free. A lot of frameworks are available. A framework is going to make sure that our entire Kubernetes cluster is based on compliance and is compliance-specific. Whichever customer I'm handling, I always look for ways to save them money because at end of the day, as they're investing in a lot of operational costs. I try to seek out mostly open-source products which are stable and reliable. Still, even if I do that, storage is an area where people need to pay the money.

The company I am working for is just a customer and end-user. 

1.20 is a quite stable version at this moment, however, Kubernetes does have another more recent version of 1.24.

For us, 40% of customers are working on the cloud and 60% of customers that have compliance policies are deployed in their own cluster and are not using a managed service from the cloud.

There are a lot of caches available. Using the cloud-based instances as one of the nodes in the Kubernetes cluster is acceptable. The question would be how many people are using manage services by any cloud provider for Kubernetes, and that is 30% or 40% of customers. They said they don't want to manage their cluster on their own. They don't want to have the headache of managing the cluster. They are focused on their business application and their business. This is what they want. That's why they are going for managed services. They don't have to do anything at all. Everything can be controlled by the cloud provider.

On the other hand, 60% of people are looking for something that offers full control. That way, at any given point of time, if they want to upgrade Kubernetes, they can. For example, there is an open policy agent, which is a policy enforcement utility or framework, which is available on the top of Kubernetes. By default, if I want to use policy enforcement on the top of the cloud, I do have multiple choices on the top of the cloud. There are some restrictions, however. With on-premises, people want everything to be their hand so they can implement anything. 

One of the major things I would recommend to users is that whenever they are doing capacity planning if they are looking at deploying the Kubernetes on top of their on-prem solution, it will likely require the purchase of hardware. In those cases, I recommend they make sure they understand what type of workload they are putting on the top of their cluster, and calculate that properly. They need to understand how much consumption is in order to understand their hardware requirements in order to get the right sizing on the one-time purchase. They need to know the number of microservices they are using and the level of power consumption in terms of CPU and memory. They will also want to calculate how much it'll scale.

Kubernetes will provide all the scalability a company needs. You can add the node and remove the node quickly. However, if you miscalculate the hardware capacity itself the infrastructure may not be able to handle it. That's why it is imperative to make sure that capacity planning is part of the process. I'd also advise companies to do a POC first before going into real production.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use the solution to manage the containers efficiently.

The solution has a well-defined interface for every other function like network, CRA container, and run-time interfaces. It is fantastic as open-source software, very generic, and easy to use.

The solution's learning courses for the new users and developers must be easier to understand. Presently, they are very abstract, and it is challenging for users to find data.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

It is a stable solution.

The solution is easily scalable. I rate it ten out of ten. Our technical team for the solution consists of ten executives. At the same time, there are two million end users.

I took help from the solution's technical team for Stack Overflow. Their service was good, and I rate it ten out of ten.

Positive

We switched to Kubernetes for better scalability, maintenance, and administration.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. I've used Rancher Kubernetes engine to set the cluster. The deployment took two days to complete. The process involved downloading the binary file and configuring it to servers.

We deployed the solution with the help of our in-house team. The team of three, including data engineers and data operations managers, execute maintenance for it.

I have seen a return on investment for the solution. 

We use the solution's open-source version.

It is easy to maintain distributed systems and applications using the solution. Although, it requires a few new features to improve managing the volumes. I rate it ten out of ten.

The primary use case of the solution is container orchestration for a microservices-based architecture.

I worked on deployment in the cloud and on-premises.

The solution has improved our organization by providing a computing layer abstraction between the cloud provider and on-premise. This has given us higher consistency in management and deployment strategies. The solution also reduces the effect of discrepancies between development and production environments.

The most valuable feature of the platform is the auto-healing and auto-scaling ability to offload to the platform tasks that were previously managed by humans.

There is a large ecosystem of products surrounding Kubernetes, making it difficult to identify the right solution due to the vast number of options.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The solution is a stable mature platform.

Scaling is a straightforward and standard process. With the integration provided by the cloud provider, we can even enable automatic scalability.

Setting up without Kubernetes provider services is complex.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

There is a large amount of overhead associated with maintenance, as we have to maintain everything from the operating system to the application. The cycle of updates and patches for the platform itself is very frequent, with a new version released every four months and various security patches in between. This makes the maintenance task very large if we have to do it ourselves.

The main benefit of Kubernetes is that it is currently the standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes is available across different cloud providers, providing consistency in management and portability that is not available with other products.

In the beginning, the solution may feel as if it has a lot of moving parts that are confusing and overwhelming.

We use Kubernetes to orchestrate the containers for deploying our Docker images to Kubernetes. I'm an Azure DevOps lead.

Kubernetes has some advanced features like auto-scaling and a good self-healing facility. If Kubernetes runs in the form of ports and one of the ports dies, a new one automatically appears. These advanced features help us to deploy our application and makes life easier.

I find the auto-scaling feature very good because rather than manually decreasing the number of nodes, we can define the threshold.

The UI should be improved. It would be helpful if it was more graphical. Kubernetes currently runs perfectly with the Linux environment because it has Docker as a container runtime, and Docker works perfectly with the Linux operating system. It should also be able to run with the MacBook and Windows OS, similar to Linux and it would be helpful if they would include this in the next release. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

If you're using a cloud service provider there's no problem with scalability. When there's a newer version, we'll upgrade our Kubernetes cluster to the latest version. 

We previously had an on-prem solution using some tools like ClearCase, which is a centralized repository we used to work under. Given that everyone is migrating to cloud, we've done the same, migrating our applications to AWS and Azure Kubernetes.

Although it doesn't take long to deploy, Kubernetes is difficult to set up even if it's the small, mini one-node Kubernetes cluster. For a cloud deployment, it's either Azure or AWS. The cloud service provider will take care of the master node. We currently have a DevOps team of seven people. If we have a big cluster, we can it into multiple clusters, one for the Dev team, one for the QA team, and one for production; each team can work on its cluster and deployment can be done quickly. 

Pricing depends on the cloud service provider. Comparing AWS and Azure, Google Cloud has a much better pricing model, as does Linode. We receive a monthly licensing account.

It's important to learn the architecture of Kubernetes and know what each and every component of Kubernetes does. It makes the deployment easier. Whether or not you choose Kubernetes depends on your use case. If you have a business model that requires minimal changes with fixed requirements then Kubernetes might not be the way to go. If you're constantly needing to make changes, Kubernetes is a great solution. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

We use Kubernetes to run some content as SaaS-based applications, and there are a few more in the pipeline to migrate from the IBM MQ server and mounting to containerization.

The best thing about Kubernetes is orchestration. It is very good. We will not see much downtime unless there are some human errors. We do not see much downtime or issues with the container or automation.

I'm a beginner, and I recently started working with Kubernetes. As of now, I don't see any bugs. However, it would be better if it could be deployed without coding.

I have been using Kubernetes for about six months.

Kubernetes is stable for now. Since we are in the process of migrating, I cannot tell for sure. But my friends have been working on it and do not have any problems. 

Kubernetes is a scalable solution. That is the reason we do not see much downtime. It is always available as needed.

Because I have an infrastructure background, it is difficult for me to code some parts. So, I depended on some experts here to deploy this solution. It is not very difficult for them.

I would tell potential users that Kubernetes is a very good solution and they should use it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Kubernetes a nine.

Kubernetes is our platform of choice for running things in production, applications, and the like. Everything we build runs on Kubernetes, it's our platform of choice. I'm the principal devs engineer.

Kubernetes has improved our time to market because it's quite lightweight and easy to install. 

The most important feature is container orchestration. Kubernetes provides us with a mechanism to deploy or run in an automated fashion across nodes. I don't need to worry if it's running on node one or node two, it's all taken care of by Kubernetes. 

They have a very minimal interface to do certain things and that could be enhanced so that someone who is not as comfortable on CLI can also use the interface and play around with the cluster. Commercial offerings like Red Hat OpenShift offer it, but the open-source community edition from CNCF doesn't. I'd like to see an incubating project there. It's not one organization that is contributing to Kubernetes, it's a CNCF project, i.e. an open-source contributing forum.

They could possibly promote some data APIs to the production stage. They have a lot of APIs which are in beta stage which they continue to test. Perhaps it's time to upgrade them to a more product-release stage. I think it would offer peace of mind to customers in terms of stability. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable product if you are on a long-term support release. It's quite widely tested and used.

Kubernetes is highly scalable. We have around 150 users and it's used daily, mainly by developers and engineers. 

Kubernetes has a very active and vibrant community forum and people can join Slack Workspace and ask questions there. They announce new releases there too and people help out. If there are issues, you can open tickets, open GitHub issues and things like that.

We previously worked with Apache Hadoop but it was becoming somewhat cumbersome and complex to install.

Deployment complexity depends on the use case. I can install it on my laptop and it's easy but if it's being installed on production it needs to be set up in a cluster formation. That kind of deployment is moderately complex, and that's where we come into the picture, providing the automation for that. For someone without any knowledge in the area, deployment might require a third-party consultant or an integrator to help with that. 

I have some basic experience with Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift, which has a very nice graphical interface. An administrator, developer, or even a user can do a lot of stuff other than just seeing what applications are running. It's something that separates the commercial offerings from the community version of Kubernetes. If there were something like that in the open-source version, it would be a game changer. Of course, the commercial version also comes with hours of tech support and guides.

We use Kubernetes for deployment of TIBCO software analyst. We then use Rancher to deploy the Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes is POD technology so you can run the number of containers you need to host one by one and use similar microservices for the containers. This is a great feature of Kubernetes. The product provides auto rollback functionality and a scale-up and scale-down functionality. These are the main features that we didn't previously have. For scaling or restarting PODs or any services is very easy. We can configure the commands to easily scale up and scale down, based on the load requirement. If some business servers added more load, then we increase the POD, and increase the services. 

Kubernetes lacks some flexibility compared to other products such as OpenShift. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have our own Terraform script to deploy the Ansible. It provisions the orchestration and deploys Kubernetes and we install Rancher over Kubernetes and deploy the entire orchestration. We don't use any third parties. We carry out our own maintenance because we don't want to be dependent on third parties.

We use the open source solution and only move to the commercial platform for the purpose of node vulnerability. We use Instana and Qualys agents for security monitoring vulnerability purposes. 

For anyone wanting to use this solution, it's important to know the basics of Linux. In addition, Docker plays an important role and it's worth checking the YAML files before moving to Kubernetes. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We are an IT services company, and I am part of a team of DevOps engineers deploying Kubernetes for customers. We deploy it on a virtual machine, so you can deploy it anywhere. 

The use case depends on the customer's deployment. For example, if the customer has microservices for lots of applications, they can use Kubernetes to segregate new microservices into different segments. They're not using a monolithic application. The same application has different components.

The best feature is autoscaling. It's effortless to use for scaling deployment parts, CI/CD, etc. 

Kubernetes should improve its consistency across different types of deployments. My customers tell me that they get much better performance when Kubernetes is deployed on VM versus PaaS services from Azure. 

I have been using Kubernetes for about two and a half years.

Kubernetes is highly stable. 

The scalability is an excellent aspect of Kubernetes. It can scale up horizontally and vertically. You can scale by cluster and node. Scalabiity is the best part of Kubernetes.

We have never contacted Kubernetes support. If have a problem, we raise a ticket to Microsoft, and their engineers will help us. 

Deploying Kubernetes is straightforward. The total deployment time depends on the number of applications and repositories we have on that day. If you are only setting up Kubernetes, it takes about five to 10 minutes, excluding the front-end IP, etc. 

Kubernetes is an open-source tool, so you only need to pay for your infrastructure. If you have your own data center, you can install Kubernetes and containerize the server, but if you're using PaaS services from Azure, so you must pay Azure for your utilizing their services. The total cost of ownership depends on your configuration. 

I rate Kubernetes eight out of 10. If your team has experience with containerization, they should work on Kubernetes. It will make development and deployment easier. 

I recommend first containerizing your application and running it in a dev environment to test it and get some experience before implementing it in a production environment.