Kubernetes Reviews

We have many applications that are running on top of Kubernetes.

The most valuable feature of Kubernetes is container orchestration.

Kubernetes can improve pod escalation.

In a future release, the dashboards could be more detailed. They are too simple.

I have been using Kubernetes for approximately five years.

Kubernetes is stable.

We have approximately 100 people using Kubernetes.

I have used the support from Kubernetes and it was good.

There is a license to use Kubernetes.

My company chose Kubernetes because it is the best tool for orchestration containers.

My advice to others that want to use this solution they should first study container concepts and create a POC.

I rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.

We have multiple use cases. We use it for pharmacy applications, databases, MySQL and web servers. We use Kubernetes for anything that runs normally.

The high availability of containerization is most valuable. We get density with planning containers, and the self-serving feature allows our developers to grab a container and complete testing. The self-serving feature is always in the cloud or locally integrated with Ceph or cluster.

The front end of Kubernetes could be built better as the front end is very rudimentary.

We have been using this solution for about five years. It is deployed both on-premises and on cloud but mainly on-premises.

It is a stable solution, and we don't have any issues.

It is very scalable. We can scale up, add notes, scale out horizontally, and scale the number of containers in a web server. We add triggers to the cluster, and it scales as needed. We have quite a few users of Kubernetes at our company, and it is very easy to add new developers as users.

The initial setup was straightforward. For testing, we fire up Kubernetes clusters about once a week for different departments. Depending on the containers, it generally takes about four hours to get a cluster up and running and connected to the storage. We've completed this many times and are familiar with the setup. We completed the setup ourselves.

The Kubernetes community edition is free, but we use OpenShift in production, which is the Red Hat version of Kubernetes.

We evaluated Swarm and some other solutions, but we eventually chose Kubernetes and OpenShift.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, in the retail field, where clients would require mobility and portability, and disposable computing, there is no comparison to Kubernetes.

We use this solution to assist with our infrastructure development work.

This solution provides a comprehensive way to scale up our ports and containers, without having to use multiple products.

The solution does not work with third-party tools, or alternative cloud providers, which limits the extent that we can utilize it to.

We would like to see visualization support added to this solution, in order to provide a wider single view of the infrastructure. 

We have been working with this solution for six months.

We have found this solution to be very stable; the only issues that have occurred have been from human error in the configuration.

This solution is extremely scalable, if a business has the budget available to do so.

The technical support for this solution is good, as long as you can provide extensive details on the issue that has arisen.

The initial setup of this product is quite complex, and requires time to understand what is needed to implement it properly. However, once the expertise has been gained, the deployment is quick and straightforward.

The solution was deployed using a third-party consultant.

This solution provides a platform for all development projects, which means that once it is implemented for one project, it can then be used for all future ones. 

The solution itself is open-source, so there is no cost attached to it. However, it requires a virtual machine to operate, which does come at a cost; a choice of a pay as you go model, or a monthly charge via an enterprise agreement. 

There is a pricing calculator available, where organizations can determine the level and number of virtual machines required, and how much that will cost.

It is important to understand the structure of the solution as a system in its own right, and we would recommend that organizations invest in vendor neutral training before implementation begins.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our setups are all Kubernetes-based. Orchestration and all of that is done through Kubernetes.

The clustering is the most valuable aspect of the solution. Reviewing all the servers and hardware from one common place is great. That is the best part of it.

The solution is stable and reliable.

It's scalable. 

Maybe it's not the scope of this product, however, some analytics information could be more available through this. Otherwise, we have to integrate Dynatrace or some kind of tool. When it has all the servers maybe it's a different scope and it wouldn't work. Some analytics would be so great, however. We'd like insights on the services and their uses, which are very limited. We have to use a third party and paid services like Dynatrace or AppDynamics.

Sometimes what happens is, if we find, let's say, OutOfThread or OutOfMemory, where our threads are blocked. If you are doing real-time analysis, you can find them. However, if it's 24 hours after somebody reports, the product is already restarted. We don't have any information about that. Thread dump and memory dumps are not available. So then we have to wait for another crash to happen. There's a lack of backup storage. That's a daily problem. With Kubernetes, whenever we get this kind of production issue, we are clueless. We can see that time OutOfMemory happened, however, we don't have much information to work with.

Therefore, having a thread dump and memory dump, and seeing how many objects were created would be useful. 

Sometimes we go to drill down. It says CPU utilization is very high. If you go inside, you'll see nothing, no information as to why. Similarly, when it says there were a lot of network errors, however, there is no information available on the network errors. It just says 10% network error, 20% network error. Yet if you drill down, there is no information available. You don't know whether it was a server that timed out, the port was not available, or some other network issue. We need more transparency in that regard. 

Sometimes the DNS Lookup service does not work very reliably unless you enable cache or something. Recently, I used the latest version of Kubernetes, and DNS cache was available, which was not available in the earlier version. Now we notice we're facing a lot of difficulties, like ENOENT errors, or "Host not found" exceptions. Every day they'd say it was an application problem, however, we ultimately figured out the DNS cache was not working properly. With the latest version, when we enabled it, things sorted out. However, when we were trying to drill down in the Kubernetes, it was not giving any information. There's no clear-cut information here as well as to why this was happening. 

I've used the solution for the last five years. 

It's very stable. We have not faced any such problem through Kubernetes. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have 15 to 20 people using the solution.

However, it's a two-way setup, and all those things are done by DevOps. That's why I'd say 15 users. As for the users are concerned, we have, let's say, 100 people. All 100 in one or the other form are going to Kubernetes, seeing the ports and seeing that information based on the services they are working on.

I don't think so we have any technical support for Kubernetes. Our DevOps team typically would look into issues. 

I didn't do the implementation. We get all the things set up for us. That said, we see a lot of information. Generally, we are more interested to go through how many parts are running, and what memory is given to each part. All those things we explore. It's very useful and intuitive.

I don't deal with the pricing aspect of the solution. 

I, myself, tried something a long back, however, I'm not able to recall what it was. I am a developer, so my focus is more on the other side of things. DevOps might have looked into other options. I'm not sure. 

We are end-users.

We use the solution both on-premises and in the cloud. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

This solution is deployed on cloud with Azure.

Managing the container was a challenge. The cloud-managed Kubernetes allow us to take care of a big system and deployment and container management without having a big operational team.

It's still difficult to manage based on my experience. There are a lot of things that need to be done to get it up and running initially. It's very complex. The whole system required a big team, and that's why we were using the managed version. If we were not using the managed version, then it would have been very difficult to manage the system. Overall, it's very powerful, but there are also a lot of complexities to manage.

In the version that we're currently using, we still have to pull in a lot for different tools, like the distribution data, distribution tracing tool, etc. For it to be fully functional, we still have to deploy more tools into it. It should come with more default rules built into it for log aggregation, distributed tracing, and monitoring, so they can definitely improve upon those things. If they had better tool integration for monitoring and log aggregation, then it would be much better.

I've been using this solution for two years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. There are two different ways you can do it. You can manage it yourself, and then you're responsible for scalability software. But if you use a cloud solution, Google GKE and Azure have AKS and AWS had EKS. If we use those kinds of services, the scalability becomes easier to manage. It's definitely scalable, but even that part is very complex to manage unless you're using a cloud managed service.

It was very complex to set up the initial structure for Kubernetes. Using managed services made it simpler.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

The following is a list of the cases when I prefer Kubernetes for application hosting:

1. Micro-services infrastructure + possible use of some service meshes, like Istio or Linkerd.
2. Cost efficiency; we are using Kubernetes in conjunction with AWS Spot Instances or Google Cloud preemptible VMs.
3. Standards-compliant infrastructures like HIPAA, PCI SOC, DSS, and ISOxxxx.
4. Highly-available or fault-tolerant infrastructures, due to some sort of self-recovery and self-healing.
5. Infrastructures with automatically scalable applications.

It's unified our technology stack across on-premises infrastructures and public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Kubernetes provides great integrations with other open-source tools, like Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic Stack, Fluentd, OAuth providers, and others.

Kubernetes distributions are also great because we adopt the platforms for different requirements. These include the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Engine, Rancher, etc.

It allows us to build custom-tailored infrastructures from small to big companies and satisfy various requirements, such as providing a proper level of RPO, RTO, scalability, cost-efficiency, and support high availability/fault tolerance.

The most valuable features of Kubernetes are:

1. Containers self-healing and self-recovery.
   
2. Unifications allow for internal Kubernetes components to be migrated between Kubernetes providers in an easier manner.
   
3. Kubernetes as a service from the major cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digital Ocean, IBM, etc. Kubernetes as a service helps in infrastructure migration from on-premises to cloud, or from cloud to cloud.
   
4. This product has a rich toolset from the community including CNI plug-ins, Helm packages, operators, dashboards, various integrations, etc.
   
5. Built-in scaling features, it's really great!

Some improvements that we would like to see are:

1. Have reacher built-in features and probably incorporate some features from the community toolset, like KEDA for pod scaling.
   
2. There are even more tools from the community for monitoring, log collectors, authorization, and authentication.
   
3. Have some sort of simplifications for wider adoption.
   
4. This product should have a more advanced built-in scheduler that uses real application metrics in the scheduling strategy.
   
5. Wider integration with cloud providers in terms of volumes and key management services.
   
6. Add support of traffic encryption option from container to container, and Ingress to the container.

We have been using Kubernetes as a self-hosted service, managed by external solutions, like Rancher, or a cloud-provider managed service (Azure AKS, Google GKE, Amazon EKS) for between three and four years.

This product is pretty stable, especially in the managed service option, but as with all platforms, it has some issues. As an example, during an update Kubernetes version on Amazon EKS from 1.17 to 1.18 Amazon duplicates workers count from 4 to 12 (should be from 4 to 8), upgrades takes more than 1 hour (should be about 10-20 minutes) and suddenly this leads to the short-time interruption of some applications during re-scheduling. In the end, we were forced to write our own rolling update scripts for updating the Kubernetes version on the nodes instances, which completes the upgrade in 10 minutes without application downtime. But again, this is an issue related to managed Kubernetes (in particular, Amazon EKS platform).

Great scalability, especially for the small and mid-size setup with fewer than 100 nodes.

We have used various platforms for managing Docker containers, such as Rancher, Azure App Service, and Portainer.

The first adoption was hard because the Kubernete's learning curve is pretty high.

The in-house team only.

It's open-source and free, so pricing should not be applied here.

Google Kubernetes Engine is free in the simplest setup, AWS Kubernetes Engine costs about $50 (depending on the region), in a three master setup, so it's almost the same as the cost of the EC2 instances and it's totally fine from my point of view.

We prefer Kubernetes due to the unification and the next level of the platform itself.

We use this solution for the hosting of micro-services. Kubernetes helps us to orchestrate all the containers hosting these micro-services.

One of the most valuable features is the ability to manage containers and pods. The solution monitors if applications are live and if issues are picked up, it automatically resolves these. This solution keeps our application in working condition. 

This is an open source solution, which gives the community the opportunity to request specific features which the Kubernetes team then work on and add to the solution.

We would to have additional features related to security within the API, instead of needing to install an add-on. 

I have used this solution for almost four years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We are able to ramp up certain campaigns which this solution manages well. We have 400 to 500 people using this solution. 

This solution took one and a half years to get ready in production. We needed to explore a lot of add-ons in order to deploy into the Kubernetes cluster. 

This is a really useful solution that is particularly useful for organizations using micro-services. This solution is not suitable for use with monolithical applications. Kubernetes works well in an on premises or cloud environment.

The suitability of this solution may vary from company to company.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

If our project requires a cloud deployment we will use a cloud provider's version of Kubernetes. For example, Azure or AWS Kubernetes Elastic Services. We try to make use of whatever is provided by the cloud providers. 

If the project requires an on-premise solution we use products from various vendors, such as Red Hat or other open-source products that can be downloaded and installed for free.

We are using Kubernetes for container management.

Kubernetes use cases are typically containerized application hosting. This is the basic use case that we do. Another use case can be deploying new application microservices which are loosely coupled and containerized using microservices-based architectures.

We can achieve a reduction of almost 50% to 60% of effort in operations by using Kubernetes.

The most valuable feature is the Zero Touch Operations, which involves a new way of performing operations and support. We do not have to do maintenance, the operations are very simple.

Kubernetes can improve by providing a service offering catalog that can be readily populated in Kubernetes. 

The service catalog, for example, could be a CRM application on Kubernetes or an eCommerce retail application packaged on Kubernetes and to be readily deployable. Instead of somebody trying to figure out all the configurations of hosting this on Kubernetes, if something was readily available, which the developers for these CRM or eCommerce products, they could partner with either AWS, Google, or Azure and make the deployment of such applications readily available on Kubernetes. 

This would allow very little work for a business to go live. The business can quickly straight away and subscribe, launch, and use. It is not difficult for an IT team to be involved to create an application environment to start up. It's would be much easier for businesses to use it directly and start off the applications.

I have been using Kubernetes for approximately three weeks.

The stability of Kubernetes depends on how we have designed it. Our design is stable because I know how to design it and if something goes wrong how to fix it.

The scalability is superb, it is highly scalable.

We have 75,000 employees in our organization that is using this solution.

Technical support is not used very frequently. We use advanced-level support occasionally. It is only in certain circumstances when we have some advanced complexity that we reach out to an expert.

A person with a moderate level of knowledge on Kubernetes, with the help of the community forum, and documentation, most of their problems can be solved.

We do not need any particular company, such as Red Hat, to come in and support the Kubernetes environment, or some other company, such as Ubuntu Canonical to be signed up for a contract to support Kubernetes. It's not required.

The initial setup is straightforward, it was not complex.

The maintenance for Kubernetes is very minimal.

You need to pay for a license if you buy branded products. For example, if you take the services from Azure, AWS, or Google, the price of the Kubernetes cluster is inclusive of the service that's being offered to us on a pay-and-use model.

I haven't tried all the advanced features of Kubernetes, but I feel it is meeting most of the requirements of a new design architecture for applications to be hosted. I don't see any particular functionality which is not available for me as of now.

The open-source ecosystem is providing lots of ideas to solve all kinds of problems. The open-source ecosystem of developers, implementers, and integrators is providing lots of ideas. If there is something I may not know, I look up to the community forum and receive answers. There are no issues of finding something, however, Kubernetes by itself has to improve. It is a matter of the implementer to discover ideas to solve the problem. The Kubernetes engine is designed very well.

I would highly recommend this solution to others.

I rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.