In our increasingly on-demand world, the need to develop, deploy and scale applications quickly — and without disruption to consumers — is more important than ever.
While the threat of an extended outage is enough to keep many IT leaders on edge, advances in cloud-native technology platforms are providing new ways to mitigate risk and improve reliability.
Enter the Kubernetes cluster, which — when deployed correctly — can help organizations:
- improve scalability
- reduce deployment time
- boost availability
- accelerate development
Cloud-Native Interest is Soaring
Far from just buzzwords, Kubernetes and cloud-native platforms are finding a prominent role in many IT organizations’ strategies this year as adoption skyrockets, according to
Brent Piatti, Business Development, Cloud & Digital Solutions at AHEAD.
“With Kubernetes, ultimately the goal is to save yourself time and headache, so you can get to market quicker and increase overall agility,” Piatti said. “We’re helping customers start small and then scale up quickly as they ramp up cloud-native tools within their production environment.”
According to a
Cloud Native Computing Foundation survey of more than 1,300 IT professionals, 92 percent reported using containers, while 83 percent said they are currently using Kubernetes in production.
A study from
451 Research, meanwhile, found that while cloud-native adoption is climbing, the vast majority of IT organizations are well shy of full adoption.
Just 13 percent of respondents reported full adoption of Kubernetes across their organization, with another 18 percent saying they remain in the discovery or proof-of-concept phase.
Where to Start?
Moving from the planning/evaluation process to actual adoption in the production environment can seem like a daunting task. There is no one right way to do it, many challenging ways to do it, and plenty of ways to mess it up along the way.
In fact, there’s an entire domain (k8s.af) devoted to Kubernetes failure stories, with household names like AirBnB, Target, and Nordstrom among the victims. The cloud-native landscape has grown incredibly crowded, with hundreds of vendors competing for market share.
That’s where a cloud-native platform, like the one launched last year by AHEAD’s partner Expedient, can make the journey toward app modernization much easier, more predictable, and better suited to balance developers’ needs with those of the infrastructure team, and the business as a whole.
How the Platform Works
Expedient’s cloud-native platform is more about how applications are deployed rather than where the workloads sit. It works on-premises, in private clouds, in public clouds, and in hybrid-cloud environments.
The platform combines the stateless nature of cloud-native infrastructure, including management and analytics tools, with the need for a stateful (traditional infrastructure) component for persistent storage.
With Expedient, that means leveraging Rancher for management and Elasticsearch for analytics, providing the ability to manage containers, monitor cluster health, receive alerts and notifications, implement global security policies and authentication, access a centralized logging view, and ultimately, deploy and manage workloads.
End-users can start small, with licensing available for a three-cluster node and the flexibility to scale-out the environment as needed.
Ready to learn more? Contact AHEAD’s Enterprise Cloud team to ask questions, schedule time to discuss a test drive, or find out more about these and other cloud solutions available from our team.
