Case Study on Kubernetes: Spotify
Let’s see what is Kubernetes?
In simple language, Kubernetes is an open source tool for automating container deployment, scaling, and management.
Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google’s experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Why we need Kubernetes and what it can do?
Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?
That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.
In today's era, almost all companies(no matter big or small) using Kubernetes for managing their production environment in a much better way.
Spotify is one of those companies which early adopt container technology and then migrating from Homegrown Orchestration to Kubernetes.
An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios.
They say that one of the major risks is migrating from local fleet to Kubernetes so to mitigating the risks, they run helios alongside too.
But another plus is Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios. During the migration, the services run on both, so we’re not having to put all of our eggs in one basket until we can validate Kubernetes under a variety of load circumstances and stress circumstances.
One of the main power of Kubernetes is its vast open source community. By which “It’s been surprisingly easy to get in touch with anybody we wanted to, to get expertise on any of the things we’re working with. And it’s helped us validate all the things we’re doing.” -JAMES WEN, SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, SPOTIFY
Success Story:
Their success story that’s come out of the early days of Kubernetes is a tool called Slingshot that a Spotify team built on Kubernetes. “With a pull request, it creates a temporary staging environment that self destructs after 24 hours,” says Chakrabarti, DIRECTOR OF ENGINEERING, INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS, SPOTIFY. It’s all facilitated by Kubernetes, so that’s kind of an exciting example of how, once the technology is out there and ready to use, people start to build on top of it and craft their own solutions, even beyond what we might have envisioned as the initial purpose of it.
Thanks for reading :)
