Why Spotify, an early adopter of container technology, migrated to Kubernetes?
Why there is a need of Kubernetes in the devops world?
To understand what is Kubernetes and it’s use-case, we first need to understand why we need Kubernetes and what kind of challenges in the companies are responsible for the development of this technology in the devops world.
No doubt, containers are fast, reliable, efficient and scalable. By using containerization technology, you can provision almost any OS in just a few seconds because Devops is all about how agile the technology is — how faster you can solve the use-cases of the current industry needs. Both Linux and docker containers isolate the application from the host.
Even though containers are scalable, there are some challenges for scaling it in the real world. Now, there is an inherent problem with containers. That is the need to keep track of them. When public cloud companies bill you for CPU time or storage then you need to make sure you do not have any orphaned machines spinning out there doing nothing. Plus there is the need to automatically spin up more when a machine needs more memory, CPU, or storage, as well as shut them down when the load lightens. Orchestration tackles these problems. This is where Kubernetes comes in.
What is Kubernetes?
It is an orchestration tool for containers. The fundamental premise behind the Kubernetes is that we can enforce desired state management and what that means is we gonna feed the cluster services a specific configuration and it will be up to the cluster services to go out and run that configuration in the infrastructure. Kubernetes is a cluster and container management tool. It lets you deploy containers to clusters, meaning a network of virtual machines. It works with different containers, not just Docker.
Case Study of Spotify
Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.
Challenge:
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. By late 2017, it became clear that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations.
Solution:
Kubernetes solved this challenge, it benefited Spotify by increasing the velocity and reducing the cost. The migration, which would happen in parallel with Helios running, could go smoothly because “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios,” says Chakrabarti. Spotify has also started to use gRPC and Envoy, replacing existing homegrown solutions, just as it had with Kubernetes.
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