Leveraging Kubernetes and Containers for Platform Development

Platforms, by design, are complex. Behind every platform that is easy to use, extend, and participate in, is a complex and evolving idea, and a more complex maintenance strategy.

But.. wait. There’s also a complex dilemma.

Platforms are designed to be more open to new ideas, innovations, and collaborations. The makers and owners purposefully lose control (at least partially) of their evolution to help address more challenges and in newer terrains. However, they’re riddled with many questions without absolutely correct answers.

Two such questions are:

1. How to ensure that the platforms will not be misused?
2. How to steer the platform in the right direction without adversely effecting its ability to foster innovation?

With the growth in digital crimes, these questions assume utmost importance and can’t be skipped, not just to comply with regulations, but more importantly because owners and platform developers do have the moral obligation to ensure the security and reliability of their innovations and products.

As the platform reaches new domains and geographies, managing platforms becomes complex. The easiest way to organize platforms without losing the required control is containerization. And the most effective way to manage containers is using Kubernetes.

Containers – To simplify complex platforms.

Containers make platforms scalable, portable, agile, and maintainable. Monolithic platforms are too complex to maintain; further, they’re not reliable too. Building them as containers makes them more scalable, as we can isolate faults and address them effectively. As the applications grow bigger, containers share and utilize resources more efficiently and hence are made faster. Here’s how containers simplify platform development and maintenance.

• Containers make it easier to add components, apps, and features to a platform.
• Apps built on containers can be made suitable for several platforms. They can be deployed to different environments as well.
• Platforms need to evolve and address consumers’ needs faster. Containers provide such agility.
• It is easier to debug isolated containers in case of errors without disturbing the rest of the application.
• Since containers share resources, they help in bringing down the application costs, especially infra costs.
• With appropriate tools to audit Docker containers, threats can be estimated and discovered automatically, making containerized platform applications more secure.

Kubernetes – The easiest way to manage containers.

Containers are great, but only if they’re orchestrated efficiently. And orchestrating containers is not an easy task. With all the complexities in networking, storage, and security, we need a good platform for orchestrating containers. Kubernetes (k8s), originally developed by Google and now being maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is the most preferred open-source platform for automatically deploying, scaling, and managing containerized applications.

With Kubernetes, you can easily scale up or down your platforms and products as per the demand. In addition to this convenience k8s offers other advantages too. 

• K8s are widely used, hence there are many open-source tools, help guides, and a rich set of APIs that makes orchestrating containers easier. The common API and platform simplify deploying, scaling, and managing containers.
• The resource management features provided by k8s are quite robust. Memory, storage, network bandwidth, etc are managed well to help the platform perform at its best and with optimum resources.
• The networking features in k8s help the makers build scalable and secure networks for their platforms.
• With security features like role-based-access-control, secrets management, and network segmentation, k8s is quite good at securing containers and applications. It also helps meet security and compliance requirements.
• K8s makes platforms more flexible and integrated by providing a common API for integrating with other tools and systems.

We love building platforms, and helping them evolve, traverse into new domains, take new shapes, and turn (sort of) immutable. They should not be pre-confined to the initial idea or version. However, as much as the makers are proud to initiate the vortex of innovation, they do not want the platform to chart into inappropriate territories. In this blog we discussed why containerization with Kubernetes is a good way to build platforms they’re scalable, adaptable, maintainable, and yet secure and reliable.

Despite the advantages of containers and Kubernetes, building platforms is not easy. Collaborations can make platform development significantly easier. It gives the makers and owners much-needed time to think about other important things.

If you are looking for such reliable collaborations for product or platform development, please talk to us.