Kubernetes Reviews

The following is a list of the cases when I prefer Kubernetes for application hosting:

1. Micro-services infrastructure + possible use of some service meshes, like Istio or Linkerd.
2. Cost efficiency; we are using Kubernetes in conjunction with AWS Spot Instances or Google Cloud preemptible VMs.
3. Standards-compliant infrastructures like HIPAA, PCI SOC, DSS, and ISOxxxx.
4. Highly-available or fault-tolerant infrastructures, due to some sort of self-recovery and self-healing.
5. Infrastructures with automatically scalable applications.

It's unified our technology stack across on-premises infrastructures and public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Kubernetes provides great integrations with other open-source tools, like Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic Stack, Fluentd, OAuth providers, and others.

Kubernetes distributions are also great because we adopt the platforms for different requirements. These include the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Engine, Rancher, etc.

It allows us to build custom-tailored infrastructures from small to big companies and satisfy various requirements, such as providing a proper level of RPO, RTO, scalability, cost-efficiency, and support high availability/fault tolerance.

The most valuable features of Kubernetes are:

1. Containers self-healing and self-recovery.
   
2. Unifications allow for internal Kubernetes components to be migrated between Kubernetes providers in an easier manner.
   
3. Kubernetes as a service from the major cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digital Ocean, IBM, etc. Kubernetes as a service helps in infrastructure migration from on-premises to cloud, or from cloud to cloud.
   
4. This product has a rich toolset from the community including CNI plug-ins, Helm packages, operators, dashboards, various integrations, etc.
   
5. Built-in scaling features, it's really great!

Some improvements that we would like to see are:

1. Have reacher built-in features and probably incorporate some features from the community toolset, like KEDA for pod scaling.
   
2. There are even more tools from the community for monitoring, log collectors, authorization, and authentication.
   
3. Have some sort of simplifications for wider adoption.
   
4. This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy.
   
5. Wider integration with cloud providers in terms of volumes and key management services.
   
6. Add support of traffic encryption option from container to container, and Ingress to the container.

We have been using Kubernetes as a self-hosted service, managed by external solutions, like Rancher, or a cloud-provider managed service (Azure AKS, Google GKE, Amazon EKS) for between three and four years.

This product is pretty stable, especially in the managed service option, but as with all platforms, it has some issues. As an example, during an update Kubernetes version on Amazon EKS from 1.17 to 1.18 Amazon duplicates workers count from 4 to 12 (should be from 4 to 8), upgrades takes more than 1 hour (should be about 10-20 minutes) and suddenly this leads to the short-time interruption of some applications during re-scheduling. In the end, we were forced to write our own rolling update scripts for updating the Kubernetes version on the nodes instances, which completes the upgrade in 10 minutes without application downtime. But again, this is an issue related to managed Kubernetes (in particular, Amazon EKS platform).

Great scalability, especially for the small and mid-size setup with fewer than 100 nodes.

We have used various platforms for managing Docker containers, such as Rancher, Azure App Service, and Portainer.

The first adoption was hard because the Kubernete's learning curve is pretty high.

The in-house team only.

It's open-source and free, so pricing should not be applied here.

Google Kubernetes Engine is free in the simplest setup, AWS Kubernetes Engine costs about $50 (depending on the region), in a three master setup, so it's almost the same as the cost of the EC2 instances and it's totally fine from my point of view.

We prefer Kubernetes due to the unification and the next level of the platform itself.

We are developing some microservices for the banking sector. We are developing microservices and deploying all of them into Kubernetes. We're looking to make these projects scalable, so we are designing the policies for scaling. Also, we are deploying some front-end items. We are integrating Kubernetes on Azure, with the keyboard and storage. This means we have to use the invoice controller to properly route the request to the final destination.

Also, we deploy a database, however, it's not the main goal; it's just for a backup plan as we've had some troubles with the database, which is currently in hosted in Oracle Cloud.

The full concept behind Kubernetes is quite good in terms of trying to really take full advantage of the resources you have. You can separate your company by names, et cetera. 

The scalability seems quite good also.

It seems that there is a community behind the solution that is supporting a lot of additional features that can be included in Kubernetes to integrate with other providers or software.

The price is something they need to improve. 

I'm not a very technical guy. Graphically, the product could be more friendly for the users. 

We'd like it if they had some sort of web management tool, I don't know if there is already one out there, however, it would help a lot.

I've used the solution for around four months.

It has been very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution can scale. It's not a problem.

We have been going into production right now, and I know there are other projects currently at the bank with the same infrastructure using Kubernetes. We're increasing usage.

While there is support from the community, I really don't know much in terms of support and if, for example, Microsoft through Azure will provide something. We have a provider that we work with that is in charge of the support. That said, it's something like a blue layer. They set up everything, however, they didn't do anything further like channel configurations or deployments. 

I didn't properly set up the cluster. It is a service from Azure. There is another team that is in charge of setting up everything about the cluster. I have only been configuring some of the requirements for the cluster.

The setup is quite small right now. We also have a pipeline supported by Jenkins and there is one person working on that side for the other configurations. So we have about two or three people (who are engineers) working on the right now.

I'm a reseller.

I've been reading a lot about the subject since it is new to me. There is a lot of good documentation. Of course, some of the Kubernetes webpage documentation is sometimes confusing as it's not that straight in terms of what you have to do. Still, it helps to take some lessons from some platforms Microsoft has. People need some training on the subject.

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

If our project requires a cloud deployment we will use a cloud provider's version of Kubernetes. For example, Azure or AWS Kubernetes Elastic Services. We try to make use of whatever is provided by the cloud providers. 

If the project requires an on-premise solution we use products from various vendors, such as Red Hat or other open-source products that can be downloaded and installed for free.

We are using Kubernetes for container management.

Kubernetes use cases are typically containerized application hosting. This is the basic use case that we do. Another use case can be deploying new application microservices which are loosely coupled and containerized using microservices-based architectures.

We can achieve a reduction of almost 50% to 60% of effort in operations by using Kubernetes.

The most valuable feature is the Zero Touch Operations, which involves a new way of performing operations and support. We do not have to do maintenance, the operations are very simple.

Kubernetes can improve by providing a service offering catalog that can be readily populated in Kubernetes. 

The service catalog, for example, could be a CRM application on Kubernetes or an eCommerce retail application packaged on Kubernetes and to be readily deployable. Instead of somebody trying to figure out all the configurations of hosting this on Kubernetes, if something was readily available, which the developers for these CRM or eCommerce products, they could partner with either AWS, Google, or Azure and make the deployment of such applications readily available on Kubernetes. 

This would allow very little work for a business to go live. The business can quickly straight away and subscribe, launch, and use. It is not difficult for an IT team to be involved to create an application environment to start up. It's would be much easier for businesses to use it directly and start off the applications.

I have been using Kubernetes for approximately three weeks.

The stability of Kubernetes depends on how we have designed it. Our design is stable because I know how to design it and if something goes wrong how to fix it.

The scalability is superb, it is highly scalable.

We have 75,000 employees in our organization that is using this solution.

Technical support is not used very frequently. We use advanced-level support occasionally. It is only in certain circumstances when we have some advanced complexity that we reach out to an expert.

A person with a moderate level of knowledge on Kubernetes, with the help of the community forum, and documentation, most of their problems can be solved.

We do not need any particular company, such as Red Hat, to come in and support the Kubernetes environment, or some other company, such as Ubuntu Canonical to be signed up for a contract to support Kubernetes. It's not required.

The initial setup is straightforward, it was not complex.

The maintenance for Kubernetes is very minimal.

You need to pay for a license if you buy branded products. For example, if you take the services from Azure, AWS, or Google, the price of the Kubernetes cluster is inclusive of the service that's being offered to us on a pay-and-use model.

I haven't tried all the advanced features of Kubernetes, but I feel it is meeting most of the requirements of a new design architecture for applications to be hosted. I don't see any particular functionality which is not available for me as of now.

The open-source ecosystem is providing lots of ideas to solve all kinds of problems. The open-source ecosystem of developers, implementers, and integrators is providing lots of ideas. If there is something I may not know, I look up to the community forum and receive answers. There are no issues of finding something, however, Kubernetes by itself has to improve. It is a matter of the implementer to discover ideas to solve the problem. The Kubernetes engine is designed very well.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.

We use Kubernetes mainly for the apps. We are a government organization, and we have many public-facing apps. We also run all our microservices run on Kubernetes.

I like that it gives you all the flexibility, for example, auto-scaling. Everything is figured out exactly right. It manages all your workloads without much intervention. It can scale in, scale out, and with security. Everything looks pretty good compared to the old legacy way of working.

Kubernetes has been tested and proven. I don't think there's anything that needs improvement, and it has been working very well. But the plugins could be better. That is one pain point we had, and we had to get in with many other open standards, like Calico networking and more. 

I have been using Kubernetes for about three years.

Kubernetes is stable.

Kubernetes was good, and it would automatically scale in and scale-out. We never had issues with scalability.

I have both Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Cloud Foundry is much better suited for an organization with less operational stuff. With about three people, you can manage all the apps in it. But Kubernetes needs patching and more, which makes it a bit tricky.

Kubernetes is open source. But we have to manage Kubernetes as a team, and the overhead is a bit high. In comparison, platforms like Cloud Foundry have much lower operational overheads. With Kubernetes, I have to manage the code, and I have to hire the developers. If someone has a product, a developer should know exactly what he's writing or there's high availability, and all those things which impact costs.

I would recommend Kubernetes to new users.

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

I use the product for microservices. 

I am impressed with the product's coupling of resources and flexibility. 

The tool needs to improve its UI. The tool is very complex and basic. 

I have been using the solution for six months. 

We haven't encountered any issues with the product. 

I would rate the product's scalability an eight out of ten. 

The solution's setup is difficult and we need to write a lot of commands. It takes one day to complete the setup. We require two people for the solution's deployment and five people for its maintenance. 

I am using the solution's open-source version. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. 

Kubernetes is open source. It's an orchestration platform for container clusters.

The solution can be deployed anywhere, such as on-premise or in the cloud.

Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration solution, known for its simplicity and ease of use. Being open-source, it benefits from large community support, including enterprise support. Many companies offer their own version of Kubernetes, making it widely adopted and supported in the industry.

The lack of native support for billing and self-service capabilities is an area Kubernetes could improve. This requires the use of third-party integrations or managed services in order for customers to be able to deploy clusters on their own. It would be beneficial to have these features built-in into the Kubernetes platform.

I have been using Kubernetes for approximately one year.

This is one of the most stable platforms in the market.

I rate the stability of Kubernetes a nine out of ten.

The scalability of Kubernetes is excellent. You can have one to two nodes and it can scale to 1,000,000 nodes.

I rate the scalability of Kubernetes a ten out of ten.

The initial setup for Kubernetes is not straightforward. Setting up a Kubernetes cluster requires some level of experience and training, as well as knowledge. The procedures and setups vary depending on the specific deployment scenario.

I rate the initial setup of Kubernetes a six out of ten.

We use one person to deploy the solution. However, it can depend on if it's a bare metal setup for on-premise, this could take longer. Starting from the bare metal for a cloud deployment one person is enough.

For the maintenance of Kubernetes, one person is more than enough because it's an orchestration platform. They only manage the container or microservices.

My advice to others is for them to gain a basic understanding and training in Kubernetes and also develop some management skills. If they are willing to learn and can manage the technology, Kubernetes is a good choice as it is an emerging and leading technology in the cloud industry.

I rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.

My primary use case of this solution is for infrastructure implementations - we allocate an EC2 instance and then define how many worker nodes are needed to run the application and the managed nodes.

More automation could improve the product - specifically, it would be useful to be able to shut down any IT machines that are currently not in use.

I have been using Kubernetes for around a year and a half.

I think this solution is stable.

I think Kubernetes is scalable in a vertical manner, depending on the type of instances in the worker mode. If you don't have resources, you can certainly add another worker node and expand the cluster.

With the latest edition of Kubernetes, there is a concern in terms of infrastructure regarding AWS support. There is no specific contact point for issues with Kubernetes, so we have to rely on the internet and blogs in order to work out what has gone wrong. 

The setup was not straightforward. There were certain challenges in setting up the product requiring a lot of time on proper configuration and compiling. The first time we deployed took a lot of time but now we can do it in around a week.

You don't need a license for Kubernetes, but you do have to pay for usage.

I would rate Kubernetes as ten out of ten.

I am using Kubernetes for particular projects.

The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is automation. It is the best tool for automation.

I have been using Kubernetes for approximately two years.

The stability of Kubernetes is very good. It does not go down.

All of our DevOps engineers are using Kubernetes in my company.

The initial setup of Kubernetes is difficult. However, if you are used to the flow then it is easier. The length of time it takes for the implementation depends on the project.

My company chose Kubernetes because it has automatic deployment.

If it is your first time using Kubernetes then you will have to study how to use it and learn how to do scripts.

I rate Kubernetes a seven out of ten.