How Kubernetes impacts Pearson.

Hello everyone, welcome to the blog on Kubernetes. Many of you are still thinking what Kubernetes is ! Lets see what Kubernetes is and what it does.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes (K8s) is a famous open source container-orchestration system which is designed by Google. Kubernetes helps our application to divide into different containers in which particular container is meant for a particular purpose. It helps to maintain our application’s containers easily. We generally divide our application into micro-services(Services running on those containers), which makes the application best out of it.

Kubernetes Features

?? Automated rollouts and rollbacks

Kubernetes progressively rolls out changes to your application or its configuration, while monitoring application health to ensure it doesn’t kill all your instances at the same time. If something goes wrong, Kubernetes will rollback the change for you. Take advantage of a growing ecosystem of deployment solutions.

?? Service Discovery and load balancing

No need to modify your application to use an unfamiliar service discovery mechanism. Kubernetes gives Pods their own IP addresses and a single DNS name for a set of Pods, and can load-balance across them.

?? Storage Orchestration

Automatically mount the storage system of your choice, whether from local storage, a public cloud provider such as GCP or AWS, or a network storage system such as NFS, iSCSI, Gluster, Ceph, Cinder, or Flocker.

?? Batch Execution

In addition to services, Kubernetes can manage your batch and CI workloads, replacing containers that fail, if desired.

?? Horizontal Scaling

Scale your application up and down with a simple command, with a UI, or automatically based on CPU usage.

?? Self Healing

Restarts containers that fail, replaces and reschedules containers when nodes die, 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.

and many. . . . .

Lets see how Kubernetes helps Pearson

Challenge

A global education company serving 75 million learners, Pearson set a goal to more than double that number, to 200 million, by 2025. A key part of this growth is in digital learning experiences, and Pearson was having difficulty in scaling and adapting to its growing online audience. They needed an infrastructure platform that would be able to scale quickly and deliver products to market faster.

Solution

"To transform our infrastructure, we had to think beyond simply enabling automated provisioning," says Chris Jackson, Director for Cloud Platforms & SRE at Pearson. "We realized we had to build a platform that would allow Pearson developers to build, manage and deploy applications in a completely different way." The team chose Docker container technology and Kubernetes orchestration "because of its flexibility, ease of management and the way it would improve our engineers' productivity."

Impact

With the platform, there has been substantial improvements in productivity and speed of delivery. "In some cases, we've gone from nine months to provision physical assets in a data center to just a few minutes to provision and get a new idea in front of a customer," says John Shirley, Lead Site Reliability Engineer for the Cloud Platform Team. Jackson estimates they've achieved 15-20% developer productivity savings. Before, outages were an issue during their busiest time of year, the back-to-school period. Now, there's high confidence in their ability to meet aggressive customer SLAs.

This is one of the challenge solved by K8s, they are many such case studies in which many companies are getting benefitted. Please refer to below link for more case studies.

https://kubernetes.io/case-studies/

Thanks for reading my blog. Hope you all loved this blog and I will come up next time with an another exciting blog. This blog I have written is a part of my journey in ARTH — The School of Technologies, guided by World Record Holder Mr. Vimal Daga.