CloudNativeCon + KubeCon 2016

Everyone is talking about using containers to deploy microservices, but exactly how all the pieces fit together is still a bit of a mystery. In this talk, we'll go over how Box went from bare-metal infrastructure that took six months to deploy a new service to using Kubernetes and Docker to deploy services in under an hour. Learn the practical details of how Box implemented containers in production, including packaging, deployment, service discovery, secret management and more, and how you can use our techniques to get containers up and running in your own organization.

With growing demand for containers in the enterprise, Pearson chose to lay its foundation with Kubernetes. With 400+ development teams across varying business units, the platform is absolutely critical. Pearson had to move away from traditional large enterprise infrastructure and aggressively pursue the efficiencies only containerization can provide. In this talk we'll walk through business and technical requirements, show how our project is exceeding expectations and discuss in depth a fully automated CD pipeline.

In this talk we'll demonstrate how we are building in security, quality assurance, abstracting away complexity, reducing overhead, aim to recover 10% of developers time, turned build tools into cattle, reduced deployment times and gained efficiencies in areas we are just beginning to understand. Throughout the presentation we'll demonstrate our current use cases with Kubernetes to include automation, tools used and management of external resources from within Kubernetes. The audience should prepare for a session of demos, releases and tech they can take advantage of immediately. 

This represents the story to date of an in-flight engineering project to modernize the digital estate of a global enterprise organization and how scale of the operation is leading us to challenge many established beliefs. Attendees will walk away with everything from workflows, to code, stories and an enterprise production use case which they can use to get started in their own endeavors.

It can be hard to fundamentally change how applications are built at a fast moving SaaS startup. Getting buy in, training and changing engineer’s daily workflows are some of the many challenges. Working as a fully remote team, often these challenges can be magnified. It’s often hard to know where to start when your team is trying to move fast, but you know how much your team will benefit from everything that Kubernetes has to offer. Our remote team had been struggling to scale our development process as we’ve grown. A couple of years ago, our team rallied around the idea that we would ship code the minute it is better than what is in production. With a single monolithic application and a growing engineering team, this became a bottle neck and deploying our tightly coupled app started to create new challenges and problems. We needed a new way for each part of our application to deployed independently and quickly. Kubernetes was the missing piece that has allowed us to stay true to our engineering culture, empowering out team of engineers to move fast while also having a resilient and stable application infrastructure. If you’re trying to figure out how to get your company to start using Kubernetes or want to encourage wider adoption on a fast moving team, you’ll need to have a plan. In this presentation, you’ll learn about one plan that worked and is continuing to work at a 6 year old company whose team has grown from 10 to 80 since they last updated their infrastructure. This presentation hopes to illustrate how Kubernetes has enabled our infrastructure to reflect our organization itself; a distributed group of autonomous people aiming to work together while not getting in each other’s way.

Many companies have a service discovery solution whether it is home grown, purchased, or something in-between. Kubernetes will have to inter-operate with those systems as it begins to move into existing environments.

This talk outlines the DNS and proxy based service discovery system that Xoom (a PayPal company) uses in all of their production infrastructure. And how a combination of containerization of the existing system, Kubernetes configuration changes, and architectural creativity gave the new Kubernetes-based platform the ability to bridge into existing systems.

As of September 1st, Comcast VIPER has deployed Kubernetes to 8 distinct physical locations. Three of these locations are production sites, running applications that provide video services to paying subscribers.

When VIPER began development on its Cloud DVR application early last year, it quickly became apparent that the scalability and uptime requirements were going to incur a high operational cost. With upwards of 15 components in a micro services architecture, we placed a bet on Kubernetes to help us develop this application quickly, and to quickly deploy it and maintain deployments in upwards of 10 regionally-located datacenters.

VIPER’s solution integrates log aggregation, monitoring, and load balancing as first class features of our Kubernetes deployments. These features, and the convenience of deploying into Kube, have helped to drive adoption of Kubernetes platform with other teams and products. 

But growth is challenging. I’ll tell the story of how we used Kubernetes to successfully deploy our Cloud DVR application.  We’ll examine the decisions that were made to arrive at a working solution, and discuss the human and technical factors that informed these decisions. Finally, I’ll highlight the factors that led to our success, and the ways we nearly failed along the way.

In this talk Oliver Beattie, Head of Engineering at European startup bank Monzo, explores how they are building a micro-services core banking platform, and how Kubernetes enables it all.

It's a new kind of bank – unshackled from beastly, complex legacy systems – one that belongs in the 21st century, and one with the best technology in the world. Topics covered include:

* Architecting applications with extreme performance and consistency requirements
* RPC at scale between thousands of services in a container environment (discovery, load balancing, fault-tolerance, and observability)
* Managing resources across physical data centres and multiple cloud providers
* How Kubernetes is particularly well-suited to building very secure applications

Though kubernetes itself provides a rich collection of resources to deploy services it also comes with a bundle of complexity. This is where DOCC (DigitalOcean Control Center) comes in. This talk will explore how the DOCC abstraction simplifies the user's interface with kubernetes and how its opinionated design allows developers to focus on their services. By building DigitalOcean’s best practices into the platform, it promotes use of existing internal tools like centralized logging, dashboards, metrics, and alerting while keeping the user interface as minimal as possible. All of which is written and maintained by a small team of engineers empowered by the kubernetes API and the flexibility it offers.

This talk will cover some of the decisions the team faced and solutions to problems when marrying an existing infrastructure with kubernetes. This talk will dive in and share examples of how using code instead of convention promotes a healthier service lifecycle and helps to remove complexity. This talk will share the team's experience when building on top of the kubernetes API and what it helped the team accomplish.

Adopting new technologies such as Kubernetes is a big change for traditional enterprise environments. Ancestry was a typical Microsoft .NET shop running in a traditional IT environment. During the past year and a half Ancestry has adopted containerization and micro services orchestrated by Kubernetes. This presentation will describe Ancestry's journey to Kubernetes. We will discuss what we have learned during these past few years from a technical and cultural perspective. This presentation will provide insights to help companies make such a transition.

Kubernetes has rapidly evolved from theoretical trials to empirical deployments in an increasing number of US enterprises. However, the Chinese enterprises unveil different traits when it comes to requirements, platforms, and the tech-savviness of the operators, rendering the upstream guidelines and references a far cry from enabling successful Kubernetes production usage in varying circumstances.

In this talk, we leverage our unique experience with using Kubernetes to manage production systems in large-scale Chinese enterprises, with a stab at stereotyping different categories of common usage scenarios not covered by the official guidelines. Peering through the mist, we aim to glean insights into the usage patterns in different industries (carrier, finance, e-commerce, and traditional, etc) to use Kubernetes more effectively.

We start with the standard Kubernetes features people are most thrilled about, then unearth the glitches and pitfalls when running Kubernetes in the wild, including dealing with Internet inaccessibility, unique security requirements, dancing with traditional, stateful applications, etc. Finally, we share our open source efforts and tools to tackle those issues in pursuit of wilder kubernetes adoption.

Enterprise deployments are complicated. When managing proprietary technologies, sensitive client data and complex rules for access rights you inevitably arrive at a situation where your PROD environment diverges from your DEV and there is no certainty that your code will work in production. You wrote an update, your unit and integration tests pass, yet your cursor is still floating half-heartedly over the 'RELEASE' button. Sounds familiar?

Time to end deploy->watch-it-break->rollback->fix->rinse-and-repeat approach. Mikhail presents DTP-on-kubernetes - the next-generation microservices platform at Bloomberg, allowing you to run several versions of your microservice in parallel against the same requests, diff their output and trace messages through the system. On top of that, enjoy the deployment in seconds, brought down from hours.

Learn what impact DTP is having on Bloomberg and how Kubernetes helped to make this system robust and stable (and of course enterprise-ready).

We first launched Kubernetes in production in June, 2015. By Kubecon of that year, we had the largest production cluster of any company in attendance. We'll share the development and operational lessons we've learned along the way.

When you start building new infrastructure from scratch, it’s relatively easy to take into account the constraints that Docker and Kubernetes impose. Unfortunately most of us aren’t starting brand new projects, but are maintaining and migrating legacy infrastructure that may not be well suited to run on Kubernetes. Over the past several months, Olark has migrated a number of services that were never designed with Kubernetes or Docker in mind from over 200 puppet-managed Ubuntu VMs to Google Container Engine. Brandon will share some of Olark’s successes and failures, so that hopefully you can have a good starting point and avoid making the same mistakes that they did. He’ll also answer some questions like: How can I set up DNS and VPN so that I can route between my legacy infrastructure and Kubernetes services? I have a stateful application, can (or should) I still use Kubernetes? What are some things I can do to reduce the risk involved in a large-scale migration?

As Kubernetes becomes more popular, the number of use cases for it grow as well, bringing with them more specialized requirements. Scheduling and launch of containers that interact with GPUs is one of such new frontiers. We'll talk about the current state of affairs, as well as ongoing work in the area. Learn also how an end user of Kubernetes can get involved and become a code contributor.

Outline:

- Show how easy it was to go from not knowing what a container is to production with Kubernetes
- Show some of the interesting ways we are autoscaling our microservices based on load
- Describe our migration process and how we were able to do it in the middle of our high traffic periods
- Describe some of the lessons learned going from AWS to GCE and running in production for almost a year
- Demo our CI/CD in Jenkins
- Describe how we geo distribute our data across the globe without a dependency on any one data store
- Show the management application we use on top of Kubernetes for self-service in the cluster

Abstract:

Many large enterprise companies are afraid of change and new technology, and we had a similar fear. Our business was growing globally, quickly, and we were buying companies! We were posed the question "How do we grow our infrastructure with our demand globally?" This question was hard to answer, and we were hesitant to spend a ton of money on licensing to scale our C#.NET and SQL Server architecture. We had to find another way! The answer was microservices, containers, and Linux infrastructure.

As we embarked on this journey into this new paradigm, we discovered Docker and all the complexities that come with Docker at scale. It was simple enough to get it up and running locally and getting smaller pet projects going. But we had more questions: what will this look like in production? How do we scale? How do we schedule? How do we keep these things up and running? How do we monitor? A host of other questions ensued. We evaluated many orchestration platforms, including Mesosphere, Deis, Fleet, Panamax, Compose/Swarm, and finally Kubernetes. We found all of these platforms had strengths and weaknesses but the outliers became Mesosphere and Kubernetes. The tie-breaker for us was the awesome community around Kubernetes and what it was based upon, as well as the rapid development and momentum of the product. This gave us confidence that our platform would co-evolve with our infrastructure, keeping pace with us!

We have been using Kubernetes since version 1.0.6 and have never looked back. We built a full SDLC workflow via Kubernetes that includes CI/CD and automatic JIRA assignments for development and QA, auto-scaling capabilities beyond Kubernetes HPAs, logging integrations, and a cadre of applications specific to our business. We want to show other companies that it's ok to embrace emerging technologies like Kubernetes. Since adopting Kubernetes, our operations have become so much more efficient, because now the people that build the software are the same ones building the infrastructure. We are running at a scale of 5 million active golfers across 10 products. We embraced the changes and came out with a world-class product. We want not only to speak to what we have done, but to inspire the conference to take the plunge and build something revolutionary.