Digital transformation across industries has led to the widespread adoption of Kubernetes. It has emerged to be the most effective solution to support container-based architectures. With this understanding, organizations irrespective of size and type are trying to leverage the platform with an aim to modernize legacy systems and develop better applications.
Even though the platform offers countless benefits, it is extremely difficult to deploy and operate particularly for enterprises managing both public cloud infrastructure and on-premises. With the ever-growing list of solutions and products, it has become increasingly difficult for organizations to find the appropriate offering.
Below we have mentioned operational and technical capabilities to consider when evaluating different enterprise Kubernetes management solutions. Let’s get started:
Easy management
Managing a Kubernetes cluster is no way an easy feat. This leads to the need for a Kubernetes platform that is capable of incorporating raw data analysis. You must deploy an automated intelligent monitoring solution to ensure early detection and intervention to prevent outages.
Prerequisites
Before you get going with Kubernetes, there are certain infrastructure requirements you need to meet depending on the solution you choose. For e.g. some solutions may require the purchase of an expensive license or investment in a hosted Kubernetes solution.
Future-ready
While considering different Kubernetes platform ensure that the platform you choose enables building a common infrastructure between cloud regions, clouds, and the data center. This is essential as you will be working with multiple cloud vendors.
Self-service capability
It is essential that developers must have self-service access to one or more Kubernetes clusters. However, it is important that the right level of isolation is in place to ensure that only team members with appropriate privileges can access the workloads.
Production-readiness
Configuring Kubernetes is a resource-intensive process creating the need for a production-ready solution that will automate all management tasks including backup, recovery and restore. This will help you overcome configuration hassles effortlessly.
CI/CD Support
Agile development and rapid delivery of new software releases are only possible with a built-in robust CI / CD pipeline. It is essential as the most critical workloads handled by developers is Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery.
High availability of Kubernetes clusters
Since Kubernetes does not offer deployment of highly available clusters, it is recommended that you chose a platform with a high availability solution and features like auto-repair and recovery. Also, ensure that at least three master nodes are configured behind a load balancing solution.
Load Balancing
Kubernetes provide load balancing for application services inside of a Kubernetes cluster but when it comes to consumption by outside clients, the platform does not provide an out-of-the-box load balancing solution. Therefore, it is recommended to choose a solution with a robust external load balancing capabilities.
SLAs are a must
Production-grade service level agreements( SLA) are must-have for your business with more and more organizations running their business on Kubernetes. Further, it is also important that your IT team can support the required SLAs.
Ease of use and maintenance
The pre-requirement for a Kubernetes platform to be successful is that it must be easy to set up, install, use, manage and maintain. Thus, ensuring that organizations can leverage the platform to the maximum. This may sound like a basic requirement but many businesses fail to overcome this barrier.
Regular Cluster upgrades
With a thriving and ever-growing community of contributors, a new version of Kubernetes platform is available every three months. While choosing a solution, make sure that it will support rolling upgrades of clusters in such a manner that the cluster API and clusters are always available even when a cluster is being upgraded.
Takeaway
Kubernetes can transform your business is a well-known fact but while choosing the right management solution for your organization consider the above-mentioned pointers to ensure that it not only provides extra features and functionalities not originally offered by Kubernetes but also simplifies the management of container clusters.
