Miscellaneous
Our guest on the podcast this week is Brian Gracely, Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat. Brian discusses a small bank in Ohio and how they have a business use-case for Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes was built to manage Google-sized technology, it is surprising that there is a reason to apply it to a small brick and mortar bank just starting with web and mobile. What they noticed in the switch is that because customers get paid on Fridays and are more likely to check if they got paid on their personal mobile device, as soon as they launched mobile their Friday traffic soared. For just one fifth of business days, Fridays received ten times the amount of traffic as any other day. This unexpected spiky traffic pattern was a great use-case for Kubernetes. Kubernetes was built to deal with problems like that, even at small businesses. We also look at the state of the big three orchestration engines: Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm. Kubernetes and Mesos began as internal projects from larger companies. Mesos began in 2014 as a container scheduler Twitter was using to manage its own containers. They released it as open-source, so a community began to form around that. It focused on big data elements because of their applications to Twitter. To this day, Mesos is still preferred to run big data applications compared to the other two. Kubernetes began as Google’s Borg technology, used internally then released open-source. It was focused on the 80/20 type of use-cases such as batch use-cases and container use-cases. What happens when open-source solutions are released is that the community flocks to one and Kubernetes won more of the community than any solution. With a strong community, Kubernetes is better suited to work with many different types of applications. Last, Docker came out with Swarm to compete in the market. They keep things as simple as possible to get a few containers clustered together. Swarm has evolved to work mostly around Docker’s data center products. Tracking this industry over time reveals how containers have evolved to having use-cases in enterprises of all sizes.