Kubernetes Reviews

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. 

There are many use cases. It's a concept of microservices-based architecture. You will find that Kubernetes is the most reliable solution. I work for a digital advertising company, for example. When you have advertisements that are served on the top of a website, or a sidebar or something, you fill those spaces with digital advertisements. It's a complete market product, and our end customers are media houses and advertisement agencies.

We are using 600 or 700 or more microservices on microservice-based architecture, and, in order to run the microservices, we use the container-based technique as it is a much more reliable platform. It's more secure due to the use of isolation techniques. Currently, we are running an almost 190 node cluster. That is a very big cluster.

This is how it is used in an advertising context: if there is a cricket game being streamed on a web portal, which has a very high viewership, a lot of companies will want to promote their ads while this particular match is playing. The portal itself is responsible for managing its streaming activity. At the same time, our company is there to display the ads on the sidebars. In such a scenario, where a high volume of people are working on some content and to handle the advertisement from the various media outlets, we need a very good auto-scaling structure. Kubernetes works well for this. At any given point in time, there is a concept for a horizontal port auto scaler based on CCP utilization. Kubernetes itself tries to increase the number of ports, which means it'll try to increase the number of instances, which are running.

Another example of how we use Kubernetes is in a banking environment. In this case, they have an on-prem version. They do not have a cloud solution at all. Occasionally, there is a high volume of transactions happening. They need flexibility. They need high availability and the very beautiful thing about the Kubernetes is that, behind the scenes, these companies are doing their own development of their own applications.

At any given point of time, if version one of the application is currently running in their data centers in form of Kubernetes, it is very easy for them to launch version two. If version one is running, and another version is running slowly, we can divert all the requests, which are coming to version one over to version two. The moment a customer accepts that particular product, we remove version one, and version two is ready. There is no downtime and no complexity. 

The deployment strategy is great. If we look into any other framework, we do not have a good deployment strategy here. The Kubernetes framework itself gives you fantastic deployment strategies with rolling updates. 

We can completely decouple solutions, which means we can scale as much as we want. Technically there are no limitations. The way you can scale up and scale down your cluster with very few commands is amazing.

With the high availability, I can put some intelligence on the top of it. We're capable of handling any type of application nowadays. While there were limitations in previous versions, we don't need to maintain the previous state of the application. The moment our application restarts, we are not required to remember what we have used before. We do not require memory. 

The product is highly scalable. 

Security-wise, there are a lot of frameworks that are available. 

The product offers security, scalability, high availability deployment, and scheduling mechanisms. These are all features that people are passionate about. 

There are a lot of complexities. They're a lot of components that are working together internally. If you look into the installation methods nowadays, it's better, however, previously, it was a very complex process. It's improving. It could still be better. Currently, we do have a very simple method in order to install Kubernetes. 

They need to focus on more security internally. The majority of the security is coming from external frameworks which means I need to deploy a third-party framework to improve the security. For example, there's Notary, OPPI, or KubeCon. Basically, there are some areas where I need to take the help of a third party. 

The solution requires networking dependence. Kubernetes does not have its own networking component. Once again, I need to work with a third party. It is fully integrated, no doubt about that, however, I need to be dependent on third-party components to make it work.  I want Kubernetes to improve security-wise and make their own stack available inside the core Kubernetes engine to make the secure implementation. If they can integrate the networking component inside the core component that would be best. With dependency removed it would give more choice to the customer. 

Currently, they're improving immutable structures and a lot of things. They're coming out with version 1.21 in order to reduce some security issues. They are removing the direct dependency from Docker. There are many areas they're working on. 

A policy enforcement engine is something people are really looking for, which could be part of the four component vertical port auto scaler. A horizontal port auto scaler is already available, however, a vertical port auto scaler should be available. 

If there was a built-in solution for login and a monitoring solution, if they can integrate some APIs or drivers where I can attach directly any monitoring tool, that would be great.  

I've worked with the solution for almost six or seven years. I've worked on this particular product rigorously. Earlier, I used to work with on-premises solutions which involved deploying the Kubernetes cluster with the hardware in a cube spray, which is the latest method.

The performance completely depends on the user. Typically, it's stable. 1.20 is a quite stable product as they have improved in many areas. Currently, that is the one stable version. Technically, yes, they are making their products stable. No doubt about that. That said, stability is an ongoing process. They are trying to improve the product in different areas. 

Performance-wise, it completely depends upon how you define and how you design your cluster. For example, what are the components you are using? How have you made your particular cluster, and under what type of workload? I've worked on medium to large scale workloads, and, if you rate out of five, I'd give it a 4.5. It's got a very good performance.

I would recommend this solution to large enterprises. That said, small enterprises still have very simple options available to them which are reliable and secure. It is very easy to manage. Still, it's more suitable for a large-scale company or maybe something that's in the mid-range, and for a small organization, I do not recommend it.

The scalability is quite impressive in this product.

The major setback of the product is the technical support. They might provide some sort of email support, however, you cannot rely on it. 

You never know when you are going to get the response and unfortunately, when it comes to having a third-party component that you can use to build your Kubernetes cluster, those are also open source, and there is often no technical support, no email support, no chat support. Many have community-based support, which you can depend on. 

This is a major setback for the user. It's the reason customers need to hire a consultant who is rigorously working with the product. In my case, as a consultant, 24/7 I'm using the Kubernetes container and OpenShift. 

Due to the lack of support, other companies take advantage. For example, Red Hat. Red Hat says, they'll give support for Kubernetes, however, you have to use their product, which is called OpenShift. If you look into the OpenShift, OpenShift is basically Kubernetes. There's only one more abstraction layer provided by Red Hat. However, Red Hat will say, I will give you the support, and it's a product made by them, so they know the loopholes. They know the way to troubleshoot it. They know what to debug. They can provide support - if you use them. Rancher is another company that does this. It's basically a Kubernetes product, with Rancher as the abstraction layer, and they will provide support to their clients. Cloud providers also have jumped onto this particular approach. If I get something directly from the Cloud provider and the Cloud provider is taking responsibility, then I don't have to worry about troubleshooting and support at all. What I need to worry about is only my client or workers and my application, which is running on the top of a particular stack. That's it.

Previously, the initial setup was complex however, right now It's pretty simple.

Nowadays, deployment will take ten to 15 minutes, depending upon the number of clusters you want. If I talk about the single master and a simple testing purpose, it's ten to 15 minutes. A multi-master technique will take possibly one hour or maybe less. It's pretty fast. In previous versions, it would take an entire day to deploy. There used to be a lot of dependencies. 

A lot of maintenance is required in terms of image creation. Maintenance is required as well as far as the volume is concerned as space is one of the main challenges. Network support is necessary which means continuous monitoring and log analysis are needed. 

If I set up the cluster as well as operational maintenance activity, I need proactive monitoring and proactive log analysis. I need someone who can manage the users, authorization, and authentication mechanisms. Kubernetes does not have an authorization authentication mechanism. I need to depend on a third-party utility. Sometimes a developer will ask you to create a user and give some provisional space. There are many activities, daily activities, that need to be covered.

In the world of management, Kubernetes does not have its own mechanism. That's why there has to be some administrator who can provide the volume to the Kubernetes administrator and the Kubernetes administrator can decide to whom they give the space. If an application is required, they will try to increase the space. 

I work as a freelancing consultant. I am actually providing consulting for the company, which I work for. I help my end customers who are service providers. I work as an independent consultant for this particular product.

Even though the solution is open-source, one major service we need to pay for is storage. Normally we are using the storage from EMC or NetApps or IBM. These companies created their own stack of provisions and if I want to use their storage for my Kubernetes clusters, these are the license stacks that I need to purchase.

Storage is the major component, as the licensing is based on that. Technically, there's an operating system license, which is something that I need to pay by default for every node, that I'm using. Other than that, with any other framework now, OPPA is completely free. Calico is completely free. A lot of frameworks are available. A framework is going to make sure that our entire Kubernetes cluster is based on compliance and is compliance-specific. Whichever customer I'm handling, I always look for ways to save them money because at end of the day, as they're investing in a lot of operational costs. I try to seek out mostly open-source products which are stable and reliable. Still, even if I do that, storage is an area where people need to pay the money.

The company I am working for is just a customer and end-user. 

1.20 is a quite stable version at this moment, however, Kubernetes does have another more recent version of 1.24.

For us, 40% of customers are working on the cloud and 60% of customers that have compliance policies are deployed in their own cluster and are not using a managed service from the cloud.

There are a lot of caches available. Using the cloud-based instances as one of the nodes in the Kubernetes cluster is acceptable. The question would be how many people are using manage services by any cloud provider for Kubernetes, and that is 30% or 40% of customers. They said they don't want to manage their cluster on their own. They don't want to have the headache of managing the cluster. They are focused on their business application and their business. This is what they want. That's why they are going for managed services. They don't have to do anything at all. Everything can be controlled by the cloud provider.

On the other hand, 60% of people are looking for something that offers full control. That way, at any given point of time, if they want to upgrade Kubernetes, they can. For example, there is an open policy agent, which is a policy enforcement utility or framework, which is available on the top of Kubernetes. By default, if I want to use policy enforcement on the top of the cloud, I do have multiple choices on the top of the cloud. There are some restrictions, however. With on-premises, people want everything to be their hand so they can implement anything. 

One of the major things I would recommend to users is that whenever they are doing capacity planning if they are looking at deploying the Kubernetes on top of their on-prem solution, it will likely require the purchase of hardware. In those cases, I recommend they make sure they understand what type of workload they are putting on the top of their cluster, and calculate that properly. They need to understand how much consumption is in order to understand their hardware requirements in order to get the right sizing on the one-time purchase. They need to know the number of microservices they are using and the level of power consumption in terms of CPU and memory. They will also want to calculate how much it'll scale.

Kubernetes will provide all the scalability a company needs. You can add the node and remove the node quickly. However, if you miscalculate the hardware capacity itself the infrastructure may not be able to handle it. That's why it is imperative to make sure that capacity planning is part of the process. I'd also advise companies to do a POC first before going into real production.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We have several use cases, but our primary use is for microservices.

One of the most valuable features is the thickness of the cloud platform or on-prem file, which makes the solution straightforward to shift and scale. It works well with different types of deployment strategies and networks.

The product features good integrations with other platforms. 

It would be great if Kubernetes could handle a level of data backup.

We have been using the solution for around five years. 

The solution is stable, and I rate it ten out of ten here. 

The platform is scalable, and we have over 30 customers using it. 

Most of our users have a basic knowledge of our definitions and account flows, so the standard practice is to raise issues when we encounter them. Kubernetes technical support can deal well with the kind of problems we face.

The initial deployment was straightforward; we used Kubespray in Ansible, and it took less than an hour.

Kubernetes is free; it's open-source software.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. 

The tool does everything we need, and we believe we have made the best choice.

I'm hesitant to recommend the platform as I prefer people to decide for themselves what is best for them, and I don't want to push a solution if someone doesn't need it. Some users will have issues only Kubernetes can solve, and they should find out how to leverage it.

Kubernetes is open source. It's an orchestration platform for container clusters.

The solution can be deployed anywhere, such as on-premise or in the cloud.

Kubernetes is a leading container orchestration solution, known for its simplicity and ease of use. Being open-source, it benefits from large community support, including enterprise support. Many companies offer their own version of Kubernetes, making it widely adopted and supported in the industry.

The lack of native support for billing and self-service capabilities is an area Kubernetes could improve. This requires the use of third-party integrations or managed services in order for customers to be able to deploy clusters on their own. It would be beneficial to have these features built-in into the Kubernetes platform.

I have been using Kubernetes for approximately one year.

This is one of the most stable platforms in the market.

I rate the stability of Kubernetes a nine out of ten.

The scalability of Kubernetes is excellent. You can have one to two nodes and it can scale to 1,000,000 nodes.

I rate the scalability of Kubernetes a ten out of ten.

The initial setup for Kubernetes is not straightforward. Setting up a Kubernetes cluster requires some level of experience and training, as well as knowledge. The procedures and setups vary depending on the specific deployment scenario.

I rate the initial setup of Kubernetes a six out of ten.

We use one person to deploy the solution. However, it can depend on if it's a bare metal setup for on-premise, this could take longer. Starting from the bare metal for a cloud deployment one person is enough.

For the maintenance of Kubernetes, one person is more than enough because it's an orchestration platform. They only manage the container or microservices.

My advice to others is for them to gain a basic understanding and training in Kubernetes and also develop some management skills. If they are willing to learn and can manage the technology, Kubernetes is a good choice as it is an emerging and leading technology in the cloud industry.

I rate Kubernetes a nine out of ten.

This solution is used for serving DevOps.

Kubernetes is quite controversial. It increases developers' overhead and allows them to provide trolling updates and zero downtime. In addition, it has increased the possibility of delivery of new features without training downtime of the application.

All the current features are quite harmonic, and they require each other.

We have been using this solution for about two years, and it is deployed on the public cloud.

I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It is infinitely scalable, and no feature can scale like Kubernetes. How much we use the solution depends on the company's business needs.

We did not use other solutions and have only used Kubernetes.

I rate the initial setup a four out of ten. It requires call writing come, YAML files and help to chart things done. You need to add something new to improve the solution and handle the traffic. The deployment was completed in-house, and one person was enough to complete the deployment.

We have not seen a return on investments. It's saved the possibility of rollout and zero downtime from projects. It's like the biggest advantage of the human ordinate.

It is an open-source solution, so it is free to use. People on the internet always advocate for cheaper options. If you want to use a managed solution, you'll have to pay for it, and it can be expensive if you manage it on your own.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, if you have a small infrastructure, do not go with full Kubernetes. Instead, use smaller solutions like K3s or Rancher and full Kubernetes if you have a vast infrastructure.

We use Kubernetes to orchestrate the containers for deploying our Docker images to Kubernetes. I'm an Azure DevOps lead.

Kubernetes has some advanced features like auto-scaling and a good self-healing facility. If Kubernetes runs in the form of ports and one of the ports dies, a new one automatically appears. These advanced features help us to deploy our application and makes life easier.

I find the auto-scaling feature very good because rather than manually decreasing the number of nodes, we can define the threshold.

The UI should be improved. It would be helpful if it was more graphical. Kubernetes currently runs perfectly with the Linux environment because it has Docker as a container runtime, and Docker works perfectly with the Linux operating system. It should also be able to run with the MacBook and Windows OS, similar to Linux and it would be helpful if they would include this in the next release. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is stable. 

If you're using a cloud service provider there's no problem with scalability. When there's a newer version, we'll upgrade our Kubernetes cluster to the latest version. 

We previously had an on-prem solution using some tools like ClearCase, which is a centralized repository we used to work under. Given that everyone is migrating to cloud, we've done the same, migrating our applications to AWS and Azure Kubernetes.

Although it doesn't take long to deploy, Kubernetes is difficult to set up even if it's the small, mini one-node Kubernetes cluster. For a cloud deployment, it's either Azure or AWS. The cloud service provider will take care of the master node. We currently have a DevOps team of seven people. If we have a big cluster, we can it into multiple clusters, one for the Dev team, one for the QA team, and one for production; each team can work on its cluster and deployment can be done quickly. 

Pricing depends on the cloud service provider. Comparing AWS and Azure, Google Cloud has a much better pricing model, as does Linode. We receive a monthly licensing account.

It's important to learn the architecture of Kubernetes and know what each and every component of Kubernetes does. It makes the deployment easier. Whether or not you choose Kubernetes depends on your use case. If you have a business model that requires minimal changes with fixed requirements then Kubernetes might not be the way to go. If you're constantly needing to make changes, Kubernetes is a great solution. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

This is a container orchestration platform used to organize our containers. Most of our applications are developed containers. We need Kubernetes to manage the network and volumes. We had approximately 50 tech team members using this solution. 

This solution is cost effective and fast. We are able to use Kubernetes to orchestrate hundreds of container images which has been a major benefit. 

There is a feature called Terraform and, based on the reviews I have read, it could be improved. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

You can scale Kubernetes up and down easily.

When it comes to support, we have mostly used the documentation provided for the solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward but you do need to know the basics. The speed and ease of the set up depends on how fast you want the application to be and the amount of traffic your application generates.

When I first started using Kubernetes, it was quite challenging. I would rate the set up a two and a half out of five.

Kubernetes is open source and is an orchestration platform. It is a cost effective solution and its pricing depends on your company and how you use it.

We evaluated solutions like OpenShift and Rancher. The great thing about Openshift is that it is ready to use out of the box. When using Kubernetes, you have to set everything up on your own. Besides that, there are not many differences between Kubernetes and the other solutions. 

This is a very good registration platform. It saves costs and is fast. You can deploy thousands of replicas of your application all at once, as long as you have enough resources. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using the solution to deploy applications that are based on the microservices architecture.

The solution has many valuable features but the most impressive is the ability to scale an application and continuously monitor if all the components of the application are functioning correctly. If one part fails, it will recreate that component only, without disrupting the application. Another valuable feature, unlike other solutions that use the imperative way of programming this solution uses the declarative way, so you only need to describe the end result and it will do everything to arrive at that state.

The solution can be improved by adding a management console that will allow the use of a graphical interface to do what is usually done using command line instructions. I would like to have a simplification of the update process, which is currently not straightforward and time-consuming. The security of the solution is in its infancy and needs a lot of work.

I have been using the solution for over a year.

The solution is stable as long as you don't touch the configuration and you know what you are doing otherwise, it will crash easily.

The solution is scalable, but it is difficult to do as a standalone solution. Most organizations use paid solutions, such as Rancher, or OpenShift that are similar to operating systems that embedded the solution in them.

The initial setup is straightforward. I am able to have a fully working cluster within half an hour. There are tools available that can help automate the deployment and reduce the time to under 15 minutes.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The solution is open source and has no fees.

I give the solution eight out of ten.

I suggest anyone who would like to use this solution first get the certification. You must be knowledgeable with Linux and comfortable with the command line interface.