KUBERNETES & HOW ADIDAS IS BENEFITED FROM IT?

Adarsha Dinda
4 min readAug 20, 2022

What is Kubernetes??

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community. Kubernetes clusters can span hosts across on-premise, public, private, or hybrid clouds. For this reason, Kubernetes is an ideal platform for hosting cloud-native applications that require rapid scaling, like real-time data streaming through Apache Kafka.

Kubernetes was originally developed and designed by engineers at Google. Google generates more than 2 billion container deployments a week, all powered by its internal platform, Borg. Borg was the predecessor to Kubernetes, and the lessons learned from developing Borg over the years became the primary influence behind much of Kubernetes technology.

Benefits of Kubernetes

Kubernetes enables users to schedule, run and monitor containers, typically in clustered configurations, and automate related operational tasks. These include:

  • Orchestrate containers across multiple hosts.
  • Make better use of hardware to maximize the resources needed to run enterprise apps.
  • Control and automate application deployments and updates.
  • Mount and add storage to run stateful apps.
  • Scale containerized applications and their resources on the fly.
  • Declaratively manage services, which guarantees the deployed applications are always running the way you intended them to run.
  • Perform load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple container instances.
  • Manage passwords, tokens, SSH keys, and other sensitive information.

How does Kubernetes work?

A working Kubernetes deployment is called a cluster. You can visualize a Kubernetes cluster as two parts: the control plane and the compute machines, or nodes. The control plane is responsible for maintaining the desired state of the cluster, such as which applications are running and which container images they use. Compute machines actually run the applications and workloads.

Kubernetes runs on top of an operating system (Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, for example) and interacts with pods of containers running on the nodes. From an infrastructure point of view, there is little change to how you manage containers. Your control over containers just happens at a higher level, giving you better control without the need to micromanage each separate container or node. Your work involves configuring Kubernetes and defining nodes, pods, and the containers within them. Kubernetes handles orchestrating the containers.

Where you run Kubernetes is up to you. This can be on bare metal servers, virtual machines, public cloud providers, private clouds, and hybrid cloud environments. One of Kubernetes’ key advantages is it works on many different kinds of infrastructure.

Case Study Of Kubernetes: Adidas

Challenge

In recent years, the Adidas team was happy with its software choices from a technology perspective — but accessing all of the tools was a problem. For instance, “just to get a developer VM, you had to send a request form, give the purpose, give the title of the project, who’s responsible, give the internal cost center a call so that they can do recharges,” says Daniel Eichten, Senior Director of Platform Engineering. “The best case is you got your machine in half an hour. Worst case is half a week or sometimes even a week.”

Solution

To improve the process, “we started from the developer point of view,” and looked for ways to shorten the time it took to get a project up and running and into the Adidas infrastructure, says Senior Director of Platform Engineering Fernando Cornago. They found the solution with containerization, agile development, continuous delivery, and a cloud-native platform that includes Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Impact

Just six months after the project began, 100% of the Adidas e-commerce site was running on Kubernetes. Load time for the e-commerce site was reduced by half. Releases went from every 4–6 weeks to 3–4 times a day. With 4,000 pods, 200 nodes, and 80,000 builds per month, Adidas is now running 40% of its most critical, impactful systems on its cloud-native platform.

“Kubernetes has the opportunity to be the new cloud platform. The amount of innovation that’s going to come from being able to standardize on Kubernetes as a platform is incredibly exciting — more exciting than anything we’ve seen in the last 10 years of working on the cloud. “

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