The migration to public cloud provides companies with needed agility and simplifies application deployment, updates and scale. Corporations gain these benefits while converting significant upfront capital expenses into ongoing monthly expenditures. Many enterprises want to take advantage of these features with their private and hybrid clouds but need a management orchestration system; Kubernetes fills that void.
Re-Stating the Case for Private Cloud
Cloud, in general, enables businesses to create an agile infrastructure. In many cases, companies prefer to manage that infrastructure themselves rather than hand it over to a third party. Why?
- A company wants to have more control over application infrastructure to ensure meeting its latency, performance, compliance or security goals.
- Regulatory concerns, such as the CLOUD Act, which allows foreign governments to gain access to company data.
- Multi-tenancy prevents the vendor from provisioning dedicated instances where and when they are needed.
- The cost of public cloud becomes prohibitive at scale and a private or hybrid cloud approach is able to deliver stronger returns on investment (ROI).
Because of such concerns, global private cloud adoption has been brisk. In fact, private cloud server revenue was $30.24 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $185.7 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research.
The Modern Application Management Challenge
A private cloud capitalizes on public cloud’s benefits without taking on the risks of public cloud infrastructure. But developers and operations staff must build and manage the computer infrastructure.
Traditional applications create large blocks of monolithic code that are difficult to manage. Cloud features a modern software design, one that is based on containers and microservices. Containers and microservices break that code up into small pieces that are mixed and matched (orchestrated) at runtime. Companies need new tools to create and manage this environment.
Kubernetes’ Power
Kubernetes is an orchestration solution that simplifies the deployment and management of containers and microservices. The open source architecture decouples application dependencies by abstracting the computer infrastructure from the application stack. Those features empower businesses to:
- allocate resources, such as storage, compute, and network, to a popular application dynamically;
- move applications and tools from infrastructure to infrastructure more freely;
- build applications via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that do not have to tinker with infrastructure innards;
- take advantage of the automation found with modern management tools; and
- no longer manually enter data to perform routine tasks, such as connecting an application to the enterprise network.
The Missing Piece
One challenge is that Kubernetes is known for its steep learning curve and operational complexity. When using Kubernetes in the public cloud, the cloud provider takes on managing all the complications. Running Kubernetes on-premises means the customer becomes responsible for that management, and many enterprises need help in this area.
Platina Command Center, our flagship product, enables on-premises orchestration of network, servers and storage, just like the public cloud. Using Command Center, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs) and security teams provision Kubernetes clusters with automated networking and storage baked in.
The automation in turn frees up developers, SREs and security teams to focus on building application-differentiating features. The solution unlocks the value of enterprise data, instead of being mired in the toil of the data center and the cost of public cloud. In essence, organizations reap all of cloud’s many benefits but still control the underlying computing infrastructure.
Businesses are opting for on-premises cloud in growing numbers. This approach provides them with needed application flexibility but creates new management challenges. A turnkey integrated infrastructure solution, such as Platina Command Center, enables them to deploy Kubernetes to manage these new applications and thus ensure that they maximize the cloud’s scalability, reliability and security.
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