Kubernetes Case Study: The New York Times

🔰 Research how Kubernetes is used in Industries and what all use cases are solved by Kubernetes?

KUBERNETES -

• Kubernetes is also known as k8s, it was designed by Google and now maintained by Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
• K8s is an open-source system.
• K8s is a container orchestration system that manages containers without human intervention.
• K8s is used for management, deployment, and scaling purposes.
• K8s has changed all manual work into automatic.
• Without the need of the ops team, k8s can launch billions of Containers.
• K8s is easy to use.
• We can run k8s anywhere as it gives the facility to run over on-premises,hybrid-cloud, or public cloud.

FEATURES OF KUBERNETES -

• AUTOMATED ROLLOUTS AND ROLLBACKS: k8s has the feature of rollout and rollback which is very much required in the Industry. The rollout is used to make update the version and rollback is used when any kind of error or bug occurred in the newer version so switch to the previous version.
• LOAD BALANCING: When the traffic of the application increases k8s divides traffic on containers.
• IPV4/IPV6 DUAL-STACK: k8s will allocate IPV4/IPV6 to PODs and containers.
• HORIZONTAL SCALING: when the admin wants he can do scaling of containers and PODs.
• SELF-HEALING: When any of the Container or POD fails k8s will immediately launch a new one.

CASE STUDY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES -

The challenge faced by The New York Times is that they shifted from their private data centers to Public cloud which was smaller and used critical applications managed on Virtual Machines.

“We started building more and more tools, and at some point, we realized that we were doing a disservice by treating Amazon as another data center,” says Deep Kapadia.

The solution to this is Google Cloud Platform’s Kubernetes as a Service aka GKE.

The impact of using Kubernetes is the time for launching a virtual machine almost takes 30–35 minutes but the container took seconds for downloading + installing + booting + login.

So finally the speed of delivery increased.

They used to deploy code on weekly basis but now they can deploy anytime independently.

The New York Times was a newspaper but in 1996 they launch their website before google in their private data centers. They used virtual machines. The critical application was running on private data centers virtual machines and the less critical application run on AWS cloud Virtual Machine.

Deep Kapadia, Executive Director, Engineering at The New York Times said “We started building more and more tools, and at some point, we realized that we were doing a disservice by treating Amazon as another data center.”

Earlier 1% traffic used to come but now 100% traffic is managed by k8s.

“Deploying Docker images versus spinning up VMs was quite a lot faster,” says Engineering Manager Brian Balser

Kubernetes is booming in the market it is providing multiple things and solving multiple challenges.

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