‘Kubernetes-as-a-Service’ for Container Infrastructure

The speed of application development and delivery is where the industry’s success lies in modern IT.

The modern IT industry has been transforming over the period to achieve that level of maturity for enhanced app delivery.

One technology that made this process easier is ‘Containers’.

Container-based architecture, as a lightweight model, has simplified the application development and created enough scope for independent and portable applications.

But the success of container architecture is purely dependent on the tools and resources associated with it, majorly Kubernetes and Docker.

Kubernetes is known for its full-stack support to managing containers on any platform, i.e., cloud or bare metal.

While every technology service in the advanced stage is transforming into the ‘as a service’ model, Kubernetes is also gaining popularity as the Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) owing to its wide range of benefits to container ecosystem.

Defining Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS)

Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) is a technology solution that offers expert support in Kubernetes (K8) services, helping customers shift to cloud-native-enabled K8-based platforms and also manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters.

This primarily includes migration of workloads to K8 clusters along with their deployment, management and maintenance on the consumer data center.

Why Kubernetes as a Service?

In a bid to achieve a competitive edge in the digital trend, most organizations are increasingly moving their workloads to container platforms.

But managing these containerized workloads is not an easy task without integrating container orchestration platforms.

Precisely at this point, Kubernetes offers to extend support as the market’s leading container orchestration tool.

These containerized workloads can be applications or componentized into microservices (hosted by containers), API servers, storage units and backend entities.

Managing them at scale, along with timely updating of stacks, in line with policy changes and at the pace of innovation may be a herculean task without the all-around expertise support.

And that comes as the Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) model as a holistic approach to managing containerized workloads.

How Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) Helps?

KaaS offers custom solutions keeping in view the organization’s budgetary constraints and datacenter capacity.

1) Security

KaaS ensures a policy-based user management system giving infrastructure access to the users as per their business requirements. During the process, KaaS providers follow the necessary security policies to ensure that security is not compromised. Whereas normal Kubernetes implementation has API servers exposed to the internet, thus being vulnerable to possible security threats.

2) Planned Investment for Resources

Be it anything, for managing KaaS terminals or physical resources to handle storage and networks within the infrastructure, a customized KaaS solution presents an overview of entire existing architecture and enables organizations to plan investment for their resources perfectly.

3) Infrastructure Scaling

The high-level automation possible with KaaS makes it easy to scale infrastructure at any point to any level. This saves time and resources, and efforts of the admin team responsible for the task.

4) Future-perfect Operations

Container-based workload management demands continuous and rolling updates. Kubernetes can suffice this requirement as an orchestration tool. However, this strategy may not fit in data center use-cases of certain organizations as best practices are still evolving to catch up with the innovation speeds.

KaaS can address this challenge with its pre-defined policies and procedures that can be customized to the changing needs in all organizations with Kubernetes.

5) Multi-cloud Portability

Given their portable nature of container applications, container applications will have to run in both private clouds and public clouds in the multi-cloud era. Moreover, access to existing apps will also be shared in the multi-cloud environment.

In such a situation, KaaS providers take care of managing and portability of apps, giving the developer the freedom to focus on building apps.

6) Centralized Control

KaaS offers control to admins to manage Kubernetes clusters from a single UI terminal. This way, admins enjoy full visibility of all contents/components of all clusters and can also monitor their performance continuously.

They may also apply different frameworks to K8 stack, trigger alerts to K8 clusters, and add security patches to detect possible vulnerabilities. Admins can connect with any container using a single medium of contact.

Kubernetes Services: AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

With the increasing adoption of Kubernetes services, Cloud service providers have become pivotal for providing advanced features to businesses to easily manage their Kubernetes clusters and applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are the leading cloud platforms enterprises are deploying their Kubernetes workloads on.

Managed Kubernetes offerings from these three cloud giants are: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Here’s a comprehensive comparison of the three managed Kubernetes service offerings:

In Conclusion

More such benefits are part of KaaS offerings. KaaS is best suitable for organizations of all sizes with containerized workloads or planning to do so in the future. Adding to the efficiency of Kubernetes clusters, KaaS brings an overall improvement in your container infrastructure.

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