By Anthony Spiteri, Senior Global Technologist at Veeam Software
A sturdy business grows from steady foundations, which is why companies must ensure they implement the right infrastructure as early as possible. With start-up owners and entrepreneurs often stretched too thinly to become a master of all trades, they must harness technology to bridge the knowledge gap, safeguard their critical data and optimise business potential.
As cloud-native adoption continues to grow, Kubernetes has become one of the fastest-growing infrastructure platforms and the true benefits for entrepreneurs are only now being recognised. For SMEs, Kubernetes provides a scalable, cost effective and secure system that is agile enough to keep pace with today’s knowledge-rich application developers.
Creating scalable applications using Kubernetes
Most startups aspire to grow quickly. Rapid growth requires swift scalability and to do so, start-ups need technology that will accommodate the input of many users. As the Australian economic market continues to remain volatile, it is critical that businesses employ scalable infrastructure that allows them to grow or shrink in alignment with these fluctuations.
For start-ups expecting their user base to grow significantly, Kubernetes can handle it. Kubernetes is designed to support large, distributed systems as it was originally developed by Google engineers and backed by their experience in building scalable platforms. It automatically scales your application to meet business needs, thus freeing up human resources to focus on other productive tasks. For instance, businesses can independently fine-tune the performance of small parts of their system to eliminate bottlenecks and achieve the right mix of performance outcomes.
A prime example of this is Pinterest’s Kubernetes story. With over 250 million monthly active users and serving over 10 billion recommendations every single day they knew these numbers would continue to grow,and began to realise the pain of scalability and performance issues. By employing Kubernetes, they can now take ideas from ideation to production in a matter of minutes, whereas previously they used to take hours or even days.
Keeping business costs down
Kubernetes software is an affordable solution that creates efficiencies that save time, money and, in turn, boosts productivity. As Kubernetes and its ecosystem evolves, automating certain workloads and processes have become critical in cost reduction – particularly in terms of securing data and resource utilisation.
Kubernetes offers automated security measures such as end-to-end vulnerability management and implementing security policy by using code. In the former, real-time admission control and real-time scanning means security teams do not need to manually intervene – freeing them up to manage other areas of cost outflows. In the latter, security is automated when building infrastructure, meaning that teams can focus on app development rather than security measures. Leveraging security policies by using code enables teams to define the ‘allowed behavior’ of their application in production, leading to less security containment costs.
Kubernetes applications automatically allow business to see details about individual containers and their resource requests and usage through real-time dashboards like Kasten. Businesses can then identify which containers are using the most resources and make adjustments to reduce overall business costs. Essentially, it allows development teams to achieve extraordinary feats of operational strength – all while minimising the financial burden on the organisation.
Putting transferable skills into play
As Kubernetes is a relatively new technology, young developers are more likely to embrace the infrastructure than traditional developers. With universities and educational institutions beginning to introduce Kubernetes into their curriculums, Australia’s youngest developers are coming into the workforce equipped with a skillset to propel the industry forward.
A recent study by The Linux Foundation and Harvard found that it’s not money driving programmers to work on open source, but rather their love of problem solving and creativity. Due to its open-source nature, Kubernetes helps to reinforce autonomous and unique ways of thinking – an agenda item being heavily driven through Australian universities. In the cloud community, Kubernetes is the most popular container management platform as it allows a large community of distinctive end-users, contributors, and maintainers. It’s also important to note that Kubernetes has support on many cloud computing platforms and cloud providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS, making it easier for Gen Z’ers to create global-reaching applications.
Today, Kubernetes stands apart from the crowd of container management structures such as Openshift and Nomad, by offering many functionalities that other monolithic tools don’t provide. Compared to its counterparts, Kubernetes brings a wide range of natively supported features and applications. It supports a variety of typical workloads, languages, and frameworks, and allows for flexibility that will suit many usage scenarios – especially those entrepreneurs and start-up businesses born during this time of global digital transformation. It’s the clear choice for managing work streams in an efficient, flexible, and cost-effective way.
