The pace of innovation has been extremely rapid in the last few decades. Business organizations must act and transform quickly to gain a competitive edge in this fast-evolving marketplace. Enterprises, with an attempt to achieve their application modernization goals, are increasingly embracing Kubernetes and integrating container orchestration platforms to manage their applications and workloads across multiple environments with ease.
However, deployment of containerized applications via Kubernetes clusters is anything but an easy feat. To adopt Kubernetes environment and integrate it with native ecosystems or cloud platforms or achieve seamless container management across different nodes and cluster resources can be a time- and resource-intensive task for an organization. The trouble does not end with Kubernetes deployment as the sustenance team is tasked to solve intermittent issues, or scale Kubernetes, or implement policy changes, etc. That's where Kubernetes as a service or KaaS comes into the picture.
What is Kubernetes as a Service?
Kubernetes as a Service or KaaS or managed Kubernetes service is a service model designed to rescue business organizations and ensure easy deployment, adoption, seamless management, full-stack support, application modernization, easy service discovery and container load balancing, as well as cost optimization. Kubernetes as a Service is usually provided as a platform deployed in public cloud. However, some managed Kubernetes services are also deployed on-premises.
With Kubernetes as a Service, businesses are geared to achieve high performance of applications, zero overprovisioning, higher agility and accuracy, and enhanced level of security and compliance management.
At the core, every Kubernetes service platform offers solutions to deploy, manage, and maintain Kubernetes clusters in an effective and cost-optimized way. Whereas, scalability, upgrades, self-service deployment, or multi-cloud operability are some of the key features of managed Kubernetes offerings. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), VMWare Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Red Hat OpenShift are some of the world's most popular managed Kubernetes services.
Benefits of Kubernetes-as-a-Service: Why managed Kubernetes services essential for product development and operations?
For Product Development
When a business opts for managed Kubernetes solution, it frees itself from most of the headache that comes with deploying and managing cloud native applications. For small and medium size organizations lacking required skills or infrastructure, this managed offering remains the most viable option. Even for companies with in-house skills to manage Kubernetes clusters, a managed offering turns their investment from CapEx to OpEx.
1. Run Kubernetes cluster instantly
In today's era of hybrid and multi-cloud, developers need flexibility to deploy Kubernetes cluster automatically from anywhere. The right managed offering enables the same, allowing developers deploy clusters from laptops to on-prem or even public cloud. As all the managed service provider takes care of all the DNS configuration, so you can rest assured that the code running on your development machines will run just as well in the cloud.
2. Remove Operational Challenges
One of the key challenges product development teams often face is ensuring the Kubernetes clusters are well-maintained, up-to-date, and scalable. However, keeping a tab on Kubernetes upgrades, following the best practices, etc. should not be the main area of focus for the developers. By opting for managed Kubernetes clusters, you can free your developers’ teams from the complexity of managing Kubernetes and ensuring timely maintenance. The vendor will take care of everything starting from node upgrades, patching, to achieving horizontal scalability. For any issue in the system, all you need is to dial their customer support number.
3. Higher focus on development
When you free your developers from calling operations teams, troubleshooting issues, you pave the way for them to deliver true value to your business. A managed service offers you a self-service Kubernetes control plane with a comprehensive Kubernetes dashboard, service port, and other guardrails that set your developers free to experiment to their hearts’ content without worrying about breaking the system.
4. Launch New Features Minus the Operational Overhead
Every minute brings an opportunity to try a new feature or roll out an important update. Cloud allows you to deploy new features and updates without going offline. Whether it’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, or any cloud computing solution for that matter, it comes with immense scalability to adapt to changes and immediately respond to any spike in demand. However, maintaining this scalable infrastructure costs high operational overhead to companies. A managed Kubernetes service turns this picture into reality, minus the overhead costs of maintaining cloud infrastructure.
5. Ease of using open source tools and processes
Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery or CI/CD pipeline is an integral part of today’s development and DevOps landscape. CI/CD pipeline naturally contains several tools and frameworks apart from Kubernetes, such as Ansible and Jenkins. While these tools support you in performing metrics monitoring, logging, database integration, tracing and dashboards, or configuring pub/sub message queueing, the IT team is required to set up the pipeline before developers can start using the ecosystem. And that’s a time-consuming process. While many companies choose to hire external talents to accelerate the process, the in-house IT teams are often called upon later to take care of any future work or troubleshooting. Kubernetes managed service offers businesses instant access to a production-ready ecosystem of open-source tools and a ready-to-use CI/CD pipeline.
Choose Your Ideal Managed Kubernetes Services Partner
Considering how a fully managed service impacts your production and operations, it is crucial to keep a few points in mind while choosing a managed service provider to support your Kubernetes cluster.
- Easy to adopt Kubernetes environment
- Full-stack support with secure multi-tenant isolation
- Easy container deployment, scaling, movement, cybersecurity, and more
- Seamless container management across nodes and clusters
- Easy container load balancing for maximum throughput
- Advanced disaster recovery management
- Cost optimization with faster GTM timelines
- Seamless manage orchestration operations across services from multiple cloud providers
As the world’s largest application-focused managed cloud services provider, Cloud4C’s unique automation engines and intelligent platforms (machine learning, deep learning solutions) help enterprises embrace a world-class managed Kubernetes services experience. Read more about Cloud's end-to-end intelligent Fully Managed kubernetes service here.
