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ITOps

Why look at Kubernetes and CoreOS

We are currently operating a service oriented architecture that is ‘dockerized’ with both host and containers running CentOS 7 when deployed straight on top of ec2 instances. We also have a deployment pipline with beanstalk + homegrown scripts. I imagine our position/maturity is similar to a lot of SMEs, we have aspirations of being on top of new technologies/practices but are some where in between old school and new school:

Old School New School
IT and Dev separate Devops (Ops and Devs have the same goals and responsibilities)
Monolithic/Large services Microservices
Big Releases Continuous Deployment
Some Automation Almost total automation with self-service
Static scaling Dynamic scaling
Config Management Image management (with immutable deployments)
IT staff have a high baseline work IT staff have low baseline work, more room for initiatives

This is not about which end of this incomplete spectrum is better… we have decided that for our place in the world, moving further the left is desirable. I know there are a lot of experienced IT operators that take this view:

Why CoreOS for Docker Hosts?

CoreOS: A lightweight Linux operating system designed for clustered deployments providing automation, security, and scalability for your most critical applications – https://coreos.com/why/

Our application and supporting services run in docker, there should not be any dependencies on the host operating system (apart from the docker engine and storage mounts).

Some questions I ask myself now:

  • Why do I need to monitor for and stage deployments of updates?
  • Why am I managing packages on a host OS that could be immutable (like CoreOS is, kind of)?
  • Why am I managing what should be homogeneous machines with puppet?
  • Why am I nursing host machines back to health when things go wrong (instead of blowing them away and redeploying)?
  • Why do I need to monitor SE Linux events?

I want a Docker Host OS that is/has:

  • Smaller, Stricter, Homogeneous and Disposable
  • Built in hosts and service clustering
  • As little management as possible post deployment

CoreOS looks good for removing the first set of questions and sufficing the wants.

Why Kubernetes?

Kubernetes: “A platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts” – http://kubernetes.io/docs/whatisk8s/

Some questions I ask myself now:

  • Should my deployment, monitoring and scaling completely separate or be a platform?
  • Why do I (IT ops) still need to be around for prod deployments (no automatic success criteria for staged deploys and not automatic rollback)?
  • Why are our deployment scripts so complex and non-portable
  • Do I want a scaling solution outside of AWS Auto-Scaling groups?

I want a tool/platform to:

  • Streamline and rationalise our complex deployment process
  • Make monitoring, scaling and deployment more manageable without our lines of homebaked scripts
  • Generally make our monitoring, scaling and deployment more able to meet changing requirements

Kubernetes looks good for removing the first set of questions and sufficing the wants.

Next steps

  • Create a CoreOS cluster
  • Install Kubernetes on the cluster
  • Deploy an application via Kubernetes
  • Assess if CoreOS and Kubernetes take us in a direction we want to go

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