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Reduce Complexity with Production-Grade Kubernetes

Reduce Complexity with Production-Grade Kubernetes

2020 was a year that few of us will ever forget. The abrupt shuttering of schools, businesses, and public services left us suddenly isolated from our communities and thrown into uncertainty about our safety and financial stability. Now imagine for a moment that this had happened in 2000, or even 2010. What would be different? Technology. Without the high‑quality digital services that we take for granted – healthcare, streaming video, remote collaboration tools – a pandemic would be a very different experience. What made the technology of 2020 so different from past decades? Containers and microservices.

Microservices architectures – which generally make use of containers and Kubernetes – fuel business growth and innovation by reducing time to market for digital experiences. Whether alongside traditional architectures or as a standalone, these modern app technologies enable superior scalability and flexibility, faster deployments, and even cost savings.

Prior to 2020, we found that most of our customers had already started adopting microservices as part of their digital transformation strategy, but the pandemic truly accelerated app modernization. Our 2020 survey of NGINX users found that 60% of respondents are using microservices in production, up from 40% in 2019, and containers are more than twice as popular as other modern app technologies.

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for managing containerized apps, as evidenced by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)’s 2020 survey, which found that 91% of respondents are using Kubernetes – 83% of them in production. When adopting Kubernetes, many organizations are prepared for substantial architectural changes but are surprised by the organizational impacts of running modern app technologies at scale. If you’re running Kubernetes, you’ve likely encountered all three of these business‑critical barriers:

The Solution: Production-Grade Kubernetes

As with most organizational problems, the answer to overcoming the challenges of Kubernetes is a combination of technology and processes. We’re going to focus on the technology component for the remainder of this post, but keep an eye out for future blogs on process and other topics.

Because Kubernetes is an open source technology, there are numerous ways to implement it. While some organizations prefer to roll their own vanilla Kubernetes, many find value in the combination of flexibility, prescriptiveness, and support provided by services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and Rancher.

Kubernetes platforms can make it easy to get up and running; however, they focus on breadth of services rather than depth. So, while you may get all the services you need in one place, they’re unlikely to offer the feature sets you need for true production readiness at scale. Namely, they don’t focus on advanced networking and security, which is where we see Kubernetes disappointing many customers.

To make Kubernetes production‑grade, you need to add three more components in this order:

  1. A scalable ingress‑egress tier to get traffic in and out of the cluster
    This is accomplished with an Ingress controller, which is a specialized load balancer that abstracts away the complexity of Kubernetes networking and bridges between services in a Kubernetes cluster and those outside it. This component becomes production‑grade when it includes features that increase resiliency (for example advanced health checks and Prometheus metrics), enable rapid scalability (dynamic reconfiguration), and support self‑service (role‑based access control [RBAC]).

  2. Built‑in security to protect against threats throughout the cluster
    While “coarse‑grained” security might be sufficient outside the cluster, “fine‑grained” security is required inside it. Depending on the complexity of your cluster, there are three locations where you may need to deploy a flexible web application firewall (WAF): on the Ingress controller, as a per‑service proxy, and as a per‑pod proxy. This flexibility lets you apply stricter controls to sensitive apps – such as billing – and looser controls where risk is lower.

  3. A scalable east‑west traffic tier to optimize traffic within the cluster
    This third component is needed once your Kubernetes applications have grown beyond the level of complexity and scale that basic tools can handle. At this stage, you need a service mesh, which is an orchestration tool that provides even finer‑grained traffic management and security to application services within the cluster. A service mesh is typically responsible for managing application routing between containerized applications, providing and enforcing autonomous service-to-service mutual TLS (mTLS) policies, and providing visibility into application availability and security.

When selecting these components, prioritize portability and visibility. Platform‑agnostic components reduce complexity and improve security, with fewer tools for your teams to learn and secure and easier shifting of workloads based on your business needs. The importance of visibility and monitoring is hard to overstate. Integrations with popular tools like Grafana and Prometheus create a unified “single pane of glass” view of your infrastructure, ensuring your team detects problems before they’re discovered by your customers. In addition, there are other complementary technologies that aren’t necessarily required for production‑grade Kubernetes but are integral parts of modern app development. For example, when organizations are ready to modernize traditional apps, one of the first steps is building microservices with an API gateway.

How NGINX Can Help

Our Kubernetes solutions are platform‑agnostic and include the three components you need to enable production‑grade Kubernetes: NGINX Ingress Controller as the ingress‑egress tier, NGINX App Protect as the WAF, and NGINX Service Mesh as the east‑west tier.

These solutions can make Kubernetes your best friend by enabling you in four key areas:

Getting Production-Ready with NGINX

NGINX Ingress Controller is available as a 30‑day free trial, which includes NGINX App Protect to secure your containerized apps. We recommend adding the always‑free NGINX Service Mesh (available for download at f5.com) to get the most out of your trial. Today you can bring your own license (BYOL) to the cloud of your choice.

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