Continuous Integration and Deployment in Kubernetes
Continuous Integration and Deployment in Kubernetes
Cloud economist Corey Quinn said that “Day to day, I solve one problem: I fix the AWS bill. There’s a few things it tends to break down into; data transfer and figuring out region arbitrage.” In his work, Quinn sees a great many enterprise cloud environments and has some insight into what problems still face microservices adoption in big businesses.
“People with an engineering background tend to have a natural bias where we focus on the tooling and the how. For example, there’s been a 30- or 40-year war going on about vi versus emacs, and there’s still no clear winner. Some people say vi is the answer, other people are just wrong. So there’s this natural tendency to get into how work gets done, almost to the point where it occludes what the work is. You see elements of this periodically arising these days with the microservices revolution. People are now starting to frantically cargo cult around what they see at conference talks, on bus advertisements, who knows where. They’re starting to twist a sort of technology that is aimed at solving political and cultural problems and trying to use it in ways that are inappropriate. You can build a fantastic torque wrench, doesn’t help you put the nail in any more effectively unless you hold it very wrong,” said Quinn.
“Where microservices came from is you have 500 engineers all working on a monolith, all stepping on each others toes. They’re very rapidly getting to a place where they’re not able to ship code effectively, and basically, you wind up with the old saying: a group of whales is called a pod, a group of crows is called a murder, a group of developers is called a merge conflict. If you break that down into different groups where small teams can work on it, that becomes a lot more usable,” said Quinn.
He went on to say that microservices can easily become more trouble than they solve if the actual reason for using them is lost in the shuffle of hundreds of unmaintainable individual services. “They wind up effectively trying to map a global solution that is aimed at this very specific setup, they aren’t focusing on what their problem is,” said Quinn.
Quinn said that dealing with microservices in a Kubernetes environment requires rethinking your entire approach. “Focus on the core competency stuff. Generally speaking, wrapping your head around the care, feeding and deployment of a complex, containerized microservices based environment is. First off something there aren’t a whole lot of people out there on the market who are competent and capable in that sphere. As well as it’s not what your company is setting out to do in most cases; it’s to sell widgets or service widgets. So bringing in someone who knows where the sharks are hiding and how to get you through that transitional phase adds tremendous value,” said Quinn.
In this Edition:
4:34: What are some of the issues that arise from using cloud-native technologies?
8:00: The human factor when adopting container orchestration technology.
14:08: Current patterns and use cases Quinn is seeing established.
17:00: The evolution of application infrastructure.
19:13: How is Kubernetes a game-changer?
21:27: Simplified service discovery.
Feature image via Pixabay.
