08 Aug Challenges in adopting Kubernetes.
In the earlier post, we looked at advantages of Kubernetes from a business perspective. In this post, we will take a look at challenges when adopting Kubernetes from a business perspective.
Overkill for simple applications.
Though, Kubernetes works great for decently sized applications and large applications but an overkill for simple applications having a handful of services that are pretty much static in nature. For example, Having Kubernetes is not the right tool for a site having few sets of pages that does not change over time. On the other hand Kubernetes makes sense for applications having many services and requires constant modification & changes.
Limited Expertise.
Kubernetes is designed by engineers at Google for engineers at Google who are assumed to have a high level of expertise. But Organizations outside of google-like, not that tech savvy to handle a Kubernetes like platform. The challenge for these firms is to hire folks having Kubernetes expertise from a limited pool or train existing one’s or follow a path having combination of both. This is one of big challenges for slow adoption of Kubernetes.
Hard to operate.
It is fairly easy to get started on Kubernetes on day-0 such as installation and deploying applications on top of it but becomes incredibly hard to manage in production. One can take a look at many failure stories related to Kubernetes here (https://github.com/hjacobs/kubernetes-failure-stories). Given the limited expertise and also hard to manage post day-0, customers take a measured approach while moving application to Kubernetes typically becomes linearly.
Fast moving.
Opensource Kubernetes has a release cadence of 3 months where new features are added, old features are either shoe horned or end-of-life’d. This fast paced change is fine for hyperscalers like google but hard to manage & operate for mid and small, who are relatively immune to changes. It also becomes a big challenge for customers to validate tool chains around kubernetes and containers when upgraded from one version to another. As we write this blog, One can observe that top managed services vendors are on version 1.14 while opensource release version is at 1.18.
Many Open Source tools.
Kubernetes is an opensource tool for orchestration of containers and requires bunch of tool chains around it to operationalize better. Take a look at CNCF landscape (https://landscape.cncf.io/), it’s a forest out there. It is not only a difficult decision for customers to decide on what tools to choose and why but also most tools are descriptive in nature providing huge bunch of information that are hard to consume.
What does tailwinds provide ?.
To address all the described problems above, Tailwinds’s Navigator is a platform that increases efficiency of SRE/Devops.
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