Kubernetes and Adidas

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is also known as K8's or kube which was developed and designed by engineer at Google. Google was one of the early contributor to Linux container technology.

It is an open source container orchestration platform that automates the manual process of deploying, managing and scaling the containerized application.

Kubernetes cluster together groups hosts running Linux containers, and helps you to easily and efficiently manage those clusters.

The design principle of kubernetes cluster is that a Kubernetes cluster should be:

• Secure- It should follow the latest security best-practices.
• Easy to use- It should be operable using a few simple commands. 
• Extendable- It shouldn’t favor one provider and should be customizable from a configuration file.

Features of Kubernetes:

• Automates various manual processes [deploy manage scale containerized application]
• Interacts with several groups of containers
• Kubernetes offers security, networking and storage services
• Self-monitoring-[Kubernetes checks constantly the health of nodes and containers]
• Horizontal and Vertical resource scaling
• Storage orchestration[Mounts and add storage system of your choice to run apps]
•  Automates rollouts and rollbacks
•  Run everywhere: 

CASE STUDY

1) Adidas

Adidas is a multiinational sportswear manufacturer. For 70 years they have helped revolutionize sports through shoes and apparel.

They believe that through sports they can change lives. Their goal is to be the best sports company in the world. Everything they do is rooted in sports.

Staying True to Its Culture, adidas Got 40% of Its Most Impactful Systems Running on Kubernetes in a Year !

• The shift was prompted in late 2013, where Adidas needed to move away from HP as its hosting provider and move all of its applications to an internal data centre.
• It asked its suppliers and partners for a quote for what it would cost to move an application from A to B, which ended up being more expensive than Eichten anticipated. He said:

Our first reaction was, what?! It was that tremendously high. Then we asked, which was even more important, why is the quote so high? They came back to us and said that a lot of things have to be done manually.

This was because over the years at Adidas, if you ever needed something technical done to a system, you had to fill in a request form, resulting in layers and layers of manual customisation.

Challenge 1:-

• Daniel Eichten, Senior Director of Platform Engineering said, "Just to get a developer VM, you had to send a request form, give the purpose, give the title of the project, who's responsible, give the internal cost center a call so they can do recharges!"
• The best case is you got your machine in half an hour. Worst case is half a week or sometimes even a week.

Solution 1:-

To overcome this, Adidas looked to containerization to reduce the costs of the move. Eichten said: "We looked into some alternatives and what we could do about it and at that point in time we found Docker. Our first reaction was that it was an awesome tool. So we thought we’d get it into our landscape, we tried it out on some local machines and everything was working at that point in time."

Challenge 2:-

However, at that point in time Docker was only supported on Ubuntu, and Adidas’ corporate Linux environment was Red Hat. As a result, its journey to containerization was delayed here.

Solution 2:

Eichten said: "So we did the second best thing we could do. We took a bunch of VMs and orchestrated everything with Puppet. That was working. Two or three months down the line, the support for Docker on Red Hat turned green. So we took our VMs we had before and we took a container on every of those. It was working, but didn’t feel as neat as it should be."

Fast forward to July 2015 and Eichten attended his first KubeCon conference in Portland, where seeing what Kubernetes could do first hand was convinced that this was something that Adidas needed in its organisation.

• It was at this point that Eichten was allowed to pursue Kubernetes, as the new CIO was keen to try new things often and wasn’t afraid of failure.
• There was a search for how the time to get project up and running could be shorten up into adidas infrastructure and the solution found was containerization, agile development, continuous delivery and cloud native platform that includes Kubernetes and Prometheus.
• The Adidas front-end is now Kubernetes and is operating at scale.

Impact:-

• Just six months after the project began, 100% of the adidas e-commerce site was running on Kubernetes.
• Load time for the e-commerce site was reduced by half.
• Releases went from every 4-6 weeks to 3-4 times a day.
• With 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds per month, adidas is now running 40% of its most critical, impactful systems on its cloud native platform.

Thankyou for taking out time to read !!