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On the road to digital transformation, companies seek to gain a competitive edge that enables them to offer new digital experiences, products and services and implement offensive and defensive business strategies. But this cannot be accomplished within existing delivery timelines of traditional software development and technologies. In combination with DevOps, cloud-native offers business leaders both technologies and software processes to deliver dynamic software capabilities at a much higher velocity that can scale.

Cloud-native is an umbrella term for applications created to take full advantage of the dynamic resources, scaling and delivery of cloud-native architecture, self-contained and independently deployable software components, typically operating on cloud services platforms. Cloud-native is achieved by containerizing smaller microservices which can be scaled and distributed dynamically or as needed.

Using DevOps, microservices packaged in containers can be individually created or enhanced in very rapid delivery cycles. Because of the dynamic nature and complexity of running large numbers of containerized microservices, container orchestration and workload management is required. Kubernetes is the most widely-used container orchestration software today.

Companies are shifting their workloads to containers and integrating container orchestration platforms to manage their containerized workloads. Now, workloads might be applications decomposed into microservices inside containers, backends, API servers or storage. To accomplish these tasks, companies may need expert resources and time to implement this transition. The operations team needs to deal with intermittent issues like scaling, upgrades of Kubernetes components and stacks, tracing, policy changes and security.

Kubernetes-as-a-service (KaaS) is a type of expertise and service to help customers shift to cloud-native-enabled Kubernetes-based platforms and manage the life cycle of Kubernetes clusters. This can include migration of workloads to Kubernetes clusters, deployment, management and maintenance of Kubernetes clusters on the customers cloud environment. It mainly manages Day 1 and Day 2 operations while moving to Kubernetes-native infrastructure, along with features like self-service, zero-touch provisioning, scaling and multi-cloud portability.

Companies cannot afford to spend excessive time or money on this transformation since the pace of innovation is so rapid. This is where Kubernetes-as-a-service becomes invaluable to companies; it offers customized solutions based on existing requirements and the scale of the cloud environment while keeping budget constraints in mind. Some of the benefits are:

Security: Deployment of the Kubernetes cluster can be easy once there is an understanding of the service delivery ecosystem and cloud and data center configuration. But this can lead to open avenues for external malicious attacks. With KaaS, we can have policy-based user management so that users of infrastructure get proper permissions to access the environment based on their business needs and requirements. KaaS would also provide security policies that can prohibit most of the security attacks like what is provided by a firewall.

Normal Kubernetes implementation exposes API servers to the internet, inviting attackers to break into services. With KaaS, multiple security methods can be used to protect the Kubernetes API server.

Effective Day 2 operations: This includes patching, upgrading, security hardening, scaling and cloud integration. These are all important as container-based workload management begins to grow. And, when considering Kubernetes, it may still not fit data center use cases because most of the best practices are still evolving to match the increasing innovation.

Additionally, applying containers in infrastructure results in positive strategies instead of backtracking, and having predefined policies and procedures that can be customized for companies to meet the ever-changing demands of working with Kubernetes.

Multi-cloud:Multi-cloud is a new trend wherein containerized applications will be portable across different public and private clouds. Also, access to existing applications will be shared in a multi-cloud environment. In this case, Kubernetes will be useful so that developers can focus on building applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, since management and portability will be provided.

Central management:It gives operations the ability to create and manage Kubernetes clusters from a single management system. An operator has better visibility of all components within overall clusters and can get continuous health monitoring using tools like Prometheus and Grafana. Operators can upgrade the Kubernetes stack along with different frameworks used in the setup.

It is also possible to remotely monitor Kubernetes clusters, check for any issues in configuration and send alerts. Additionally, the operator can apply patches to clusters if there are any security vulnerabilities associated with the technology stack deployed within the clusters. An operator can reach out to any pods or containers in a network of different clusters.

Implementing Kubernetes is not just a solution, but it might create several issues that can cause security as well as resource consumption. A Kubernetes-as-a-service offering is a breather for companies ranging from large-scale to small-scale who already have shifted workloads to a containerized model.

Donald Lutz, senior cloud and software architect, Taos, an IBM company, co-authored this piece with Mitch Ashley.

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Cloud-Native and Kubernetes-as-a-Service - Container Journal