An Early Adopter of Containers, Spotify Is Migrating from Homegrown Orchestration to Kubernetes.

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? Welcome You All To The World of DevOps ?

This Article is based on how Kubernetes is used in Industries and what all use cases are solved by Kubernetes?

I have shown how Kubernetes turned out a boon for Spotify and what are the various uses cases solved by the Kubernetes...

As we know that Spotify is a digital music streaming service started in 2006.

And as it is known for its user experience, music recommendation which is continuously getting improved. Behind the scene, it uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to improve and personalize the music experience for its listeners.

But what excites us the most is the amazing ways it uses to enhance the user experience.

?? What is Kubernetes ?

??Kubernetes is an open-source container-orchestration system for automating computer application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

??Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.

??The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. 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.

??Kubernetes can support data center outsourcing to public cloud service providers or can be used for web hosting at scale.

??Kubernetes offers a rich set of controls that can be used to effectively secure clusters and their applications. Kubernetes network policies, for example, behave like firewall rules that control how pods communicate with each other and other endpoints.

??Kubernetes provides you with:

• Service discovery and load balancing Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using their own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.
• Storage orchestration Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers and adopt all their resources to the new container.
• Automatic bin packing You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.
• Self-healing Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don't respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn't advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
• Secret and configuration management Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.

?? Challenge faced by Spotify before they using Kubernetes

Launched in 2008, the audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. "Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today—and hopefully the consumers we'll have in the future," says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations. 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," he says.

?  Solution :

"We saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that," says Chakrabarti. Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Plus, "we wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools." At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence in the flourishing Kubernetes community. 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.

?? Impact (benefits after using K8S)

The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for a migration, which started late that year and is a big focus for 2019. “A small percentage of our fleet has been migrated to Kubernetes, and some of the things that we’ve heard from our internal teams are that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” says Chakrabarti. The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from AutoScaling, says Site Reliability Engineer James Wen. Plus, he adds, “Before, teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes.”

In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold.

"We were able to use a lot of the Kubernetes APIs and extensibility features to support and interface with our legacy infrastructure, so the integration was straightforward and easy."

— JAMES WEN, SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER, SPOTIFY

? Chakrabarti points out that for all four of the top-level metrics that Spotify looks at lead time, deployment frequency, time to resolution, and operational load, "there is impact that Kubernetes is having."

Spotify has also started to use gRPC and Envoy, replacing existing homegrown solutions, just as it had with Kubernetes. "We created things because of the scale we were at, and there was no other solution existing" says Dave Zolotusky, Software Engineer, Infrastructure and Operations. "But then the community kind of caught up and surpassed us, even for tools that work at that scale."

Both of those technologies are in early stages of adoption, but already "we have reason to believe that gRPC will have a more drastic impact during early development by helping with a lot of issues like schema management, API design, weird backward compatibility issues, things like that," says Zolotusky. "So we're leaning heavily on gRPC to help us in that space."

"The community has been extremely helpful in getting us to work through all the technology much faster and much easier. And it's helped us validate all the things we're doing."

— DAVE ZOLOTUSKY, SOFTWARE ENGINEER, INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS, SPOTIFY

?? Conclusion ??

“Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today — and hopefully the consumers we’ll have in the future,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations at Spotify. Since the audio-streaming platform launched in 2008, it has already grown to over 200 million monthly active users around the world, and for Chakrabarti’s team, the goal is solidifying Spotify’s infrastructure to support all those future consumers too.

I hope this article will help you to know about Kubernetes and how Spotify uses Kubernetes for rapid scalability and better user experience.