Kubernetes... managed, on demand

Yuri Colombi, Head of Solutions & Innovation, EBRC
By S. Lambotte 13/11/2020
Banking, Insurance & Fintech
Health & Life Sciences
Public Sector & European Institutions
Defense & Space
Technology & Software Providers
Energy, Logistics & Industry

Businesses will reap the rewards of KaaS – Kubernetes-as-a-Service – the latest innovation from EBRC. This highly innovative solution gives developers added flexibility, while also being good value and highly secure.

Organisations working online now have no option but to adapt and innovate rapidly. Competition to gain and retain customers will continue to grow. To meet these business needs, technologies related to DevOps methodologies have emerged, notably cloud native tools such as Kubernetes. These tools deliver the automation and agility development teams need to continually manage, adapt, test and boost the performance of different applications. Thus they can respond to requests from across the business, particularly sales and marketing teams, while satisfying every security requirement.

The result is businesses freed from the limitations imposed by old development methodologies. There is no longer a need to plan months in advance for relatively infrequent deployments. Upgrades can now be implemented easily, at any stage to meet evolving business requirements in full security. Simplify deployment at lower cost: those are the key advantages of Kubernetes-as-a-Service. “We work to help our clients achieve their development goals more quickly,” explained Yuri Colombi, Head of Solutions & Innovation at EBRC.

Focus on business needs in a changing world

“The only thing that is constant is change,” noted the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus 2,500 years ago. This time-honoured wisdom underlines the continual need for innovation by online service providers seeking to attract and retain clients. No longer can new applications take 18 months to plan and implement. They must evolve permanently to add functionality, upgrade the interface, fix bugs, and patch security flaws. Kubernetes accelerates each stage of development and delivery, by supplying the configuration tools required to meet best practice. Thus developers can work with shorter, less restrictive delivery schedules which give the incremental upgrades clients find useful. “Businesses which constantly review customer behaviour can thus react quickly to match supply to changing demand,” explained Gérard Miceli, Innovation Consultant at EBRC.

Freed from various constraints around application deployment, testing, and synchronisation with production teams, efforts can be focused on delivering the business functionality operational teams need and expect.

More efficient, cost effective resources

So rather than having to wait weeks or even months just to have the basic physical or cloud infrastructure they need for their applications, developers can have quick access to these environments on a self-service basis.

The beauty of KaaS is it is “agnostic” about the cloud platform used. Applications do not need to be modified, regardless of whether the KaaS is deployed on-premises or through the cloud. They can grow quickly without having to redefine or rebuild the infrastructure for each new project. “Regardless of the underlying infrastructure, KaaS offers a management environment focused on the container . It orchestrates resources (computing, network, storage) for user workloads, all the time maintaining portability between different infrastructure providers,” Gérard Miceli added.

Indirectly, this increased speed frees-up resources. Large parts of the application portfolio can be upgraded even more quickly and at a lower cost. This will foster business innovation by allowing key services to be presented in the form of application components.

“As-a-service” is an added dimension

Nevertheless, this flexibility comes with its own challenges. The open-source Kubernetes community continues to develop and refine available tools and systems, so many DevOps teams must create more rationalised, automated processes which are able to meet new deployment needs. Thus teams need Kubernetes “as-a-service”.

EBRC deploys, hosts and maintains every element needed for KaaS to work effectively. EBRC thus frees clients from the support constraints which are typical for this kind of platform. This enables developers to concentrate on adding value and innovation.

“Managing these systems at scale, while ensuring timely updates of modules linked to Docker and Kubernetes can add a substantial workload, unless comprehensive external support is provided,” Yuri Colombi noted. “Hence the advantage of working in managed mode, which can be seen as an holistic approach to the management of containerised work requirements.” This is where EBRC’s expertise in operational management is valuable, where these needs can be met through Kubernetes as-a-Service. This sees EBRC installing, running and managing the solution, guaranteeing a 99.9% SLA 24/7. This package also includes consulting services, particularly concerning best practice around the use of Kubernetes functionality. All day-to-day tasks can thus be handled without downtime, be they security updates, bug fixes and more.

The data are housed in Europe, in Luxembourg

Based on certified CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) Kubernetes distribution methods, Kubernetes-as-a-Service is a managed DevOps platform. This features hybrid cloud architecture, with capacity on-premises and in control infrastructure located in Tier IV certified data centres in Luxembourg. Data is therefore always stored in Luxembourg, thus setting it apart from public cloud solutions.

“The client can choose a service managed fully on the premises, or in a private cloud, or on the public cloud. All options are open to them,” said Gérard Miceli. “The mode of operation is the same: no CAPEX, only OPEX. Once Kubernetes-as-a-Service is deployed, developers no longer have to worry about the infrastructure and underlying configuration. Applications have multi-cloud portability on public and private clouds.”

Accelerate your growth

“Kubernetes-as-a-Ser vice enables DevOps teams to offer clients the autonomy they need to manage their CI/CD pipelines without any restriction. The managed mode, based on the EBRC platform, enables them to focus on the work that is most important to them,” said Yuri Colombi. “Clients concentrate on their business and their drive to innovate, while EBRC ensures that the KaaS platform is available and up-to-date.”