How to Effectively Control Requests, the Silent Killer of Elasticity & Efficiency

Now that Kubernetes has graduated to enterprise-ready, organizations are looking to expand their platforms to support more applications and more lines of business. In order to do this at scale, they need to support these applications and lines of business in multitenant environments—even modern microservice applications have to share resources!

Microservices are all well and good, but these are just our modern day applications. And all applications, especially enterprise applications need to be secure. In my previous post I talked about how we were able to dynamically manage Java memory for each of the processes running in our re-architected microservices application. This was just one example of the realities we face when building an enterprise microservices application. We re-architected our application to scale with and automate some of the world’s largest hybrid cloud estates. With that kind of responsibility, every service of this application must be secured.

This is the first of a multi-part series sharing our journey to application elasticity.

Don’t Let the Complexity of Microservices and Cloud Native Stall the Next-Gen Platforms that Run Your Modern Applications

When it comes to containers, modernization is about architecting applications for speed, scale, and elasticity. Microservice architectures and the CI/CD pipelines that support them are enabling developer speed, but increase the complexity of ensuring application services continuously run. 

PaaS is a platform upon which developers can build and deploy applications. Within the PaaS market, two of the major players are Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. They’re both platform services for deploying cloud-native apps, and they both deal with containers, and the list goes on. These products offer a higher level of abstraction than we get from IaaS products meaning that, beyond networking, storage and servers, the application’s O/S, middleware and runtime are all managed by the PaaS.

What’s New

Today Turbonomic announces its support for Kubernetes-as-a-Service offerings from Amazon, Azure, Google, and Pivotal. Now workloads in your KaaS deployments can self-manage—continuously navigating the tradeoffs between performance, compliance and cost. More specifically, the actions that can be automated in these Kubernetes distributions:

Kubernetes “won” and has become the most widely used container orchestration platform for deploying, scaling, and managing containers. The offspring of Borg has grown up and is in Production. Part of the benefits of Kubernetes is that it can be deployed on many different platforms, or choices for infrastructure providing compute, storage and network resources: on-prem or public cloud; build your own or great commercial offers like OpenShift or the growing provider/Kubernetes-as-a-Service market that includes GKE, EKS, AKS (more about that later); down to VMs or bare metal. The choice is yours.

Containers are today’s modern application standard, enabling rapid, iterative development and portability across any infrastructure. Container platforms—like Kubernetes—have risen out of the need to manage ever more distributed and dynamic cloud native applications. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

The software development landscape can be daunting: it’s crowded, and filled with myriad tools, techniques and approaches to building applications. Software application design naturally evolves alongside the web, and the landscape is only getting busier as the scale and speed of the web continue to grow at an incredible rate.

There was a first happening in Toronto on November 14th.  We saw the introduction of the first Kubernetes Meetup group at the Google office in Toronto.  It was a rather apropos location for the first event.  There are many reasons that I enjoy meetups, not least of which is the fact that they are very much focused on getting a community of folks together to really nerd out on technical content.