Navigating the Complexities of Rapidly Scaling Kubernetes Environments
The total market for Kubernetes technology is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23.4% between 2024 and 2031, according to SkyQuest. Kubernetes has become the de facto platform to deploy all types of applications, ranging from legacy applications to next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
To support the growth of Kubernetes, platform teams increasingly use multiple distributions to avoid vendor lock-in, and are deploying Kubernetes clusters on-premises, in the cloud and edge environments for efficiency. Teams are also scaling Kubernetes environments from single to multi-cluster setups, and even considering using Kubernetes to manage virtual machines (VMs), leveraging innovations such as KubeVirt.
As environments scale, Kubernetes networking challenges persist. To overcome these challenges, organizations can adopt a unified approach to Kubernetes networking and security, implementing processes and tooling that provide centralized visibility and management for ingress, egress, in-cluster and multi-cluster traffic.
The Roadblocks to Efficient Kubernetes Scaling
Platform teams today are forced to select, integrate, manage and troubleshoot disparate tools for secure ingress, egress, in-cluster and multi-cluster networking, leading to challenges. While selecting the Kubernetes platform vendor-provided networking solution is an easy choice, in reality, each distribution has its own networking, which may not be compatible with other distributions. This creates vendor lock-in and requires platform teams to use multiple tools every time they add a new distribution. Most networking tools provided by Kubernetes vendors are also limited to single-cluster deployments. Scaling to multi-cluster requires the implementation of an additional multi-cluster networking solution.
The successful expansion of Kubernetes infrastructure now requires collaboration across platform, security, DevOps and networking teams, which creates roadblocks to scaling. While most platform teams have been experimenting with and utilizing Kubernetes for years, the technology is much newer to security and networking teams. These factors, combined with the use of disparate and complex tooling, can impact the speed of Kubernetes expansion.
Network issues are harder to troubleshoot as organizations scale and rely on multiple solutions, risking possible business outage and financial losses. Many organizations run mission-critical applications on Kubernetes with millions of transactions being processed at any given time, underscoring the need for rapid troubleshooting.
Previously overlooked, Kubernetes security is now front and center, given that mission-critical applications are running on Kubernetes. The blast radius of one attack can have far-reaching implications. Managing network security and compliance separately for every Kubernetes network is complex and does not protect organizations against rising risks.
Overcoming the Obstacles in Kubernetes Scalability
Tool consolidation is essential to ensure the efficient, secure scaling of Kubernetes operations. Organizations must adopt technologies that can provide a single pane of glass view of all traffic, as well as security and networking data within a single interface. This ensures teams have fewer consoles to cross-reference and allows developers and security teams to focus on higher-priority tasks.
As organizations scale, observability is critical, as it is impossible to manually determine what is happening within every cluster. Organizations must implement mechanisms that provide a real-time view of all traffic and enable seamless troubleshooting. When selecting and deploying a solution, it is also crucial that organizations implement an enterprise-grade solution. Large-scale, mission-critical transactions require solutions that can handle performance at scale.
As highlighted, organizations must also ensure that solutions deployed will help facilitate the deep collaboration across teams – from networking, security, platform and developers - to scale Kubernetes environments successfully.
Finally, organizations must remain true to the original mission and objective of Kubernetes. Kubernetes was designed to drive innovation and provide organizations with flexibility and scalability across their infrastructures. However, most fundamentally, it was created to prevent vendor or cloud lock-in and allow organizations to maintain neutrality. When making design choices, organizations should consider whether these choices will lock them into a specific cloud vendor or allow them to stay cloud and Kubernetes distribution neutral. This consideration is crucial to avoid future infrastructure cost increases.
Navigating the Complexities of Scaling Kubernetes Environments
Managing Kubernetes traffic with disparate technologies creates challenges, especially when scaling, emphasizing the need for tool consolidation. Adopting technologies that provide a unified view of traffic, security and networking data within a single interface is essential for efficient scaling and troubleshooting, and also allows teams to focus on higher priority tasks. While the use of free, baseline tools may have been effective at the initial onset of Kubernetes adoption, these tools cannot support the current needs for efficiency and scalability.
