📖 Introduction
In the rapidly evolving technology landscape, it's not just large global enterprises that are turning to Kubernetes to modernize their IT infrastructure. Increasingly, small and medium-sized businesses are doing the same. We've helped some of them along the way, and in this post, we'd like to shed some light on Kubernetes from an SMB perspective, based on our experience.
😮💨 SMB Challenges
Contrary to popular case studies of today's "Netflixes" and "Spotifys," which mostly highlight the scalability and cost-effectiveness of Kubernetes, we've found that SMBs often face different challenges:
- Infrastructure resiliency
- Observability of infrastructure and applications
- Comprehensive and up-to-date documentation
- Long mean time to discovery and recovery
- Complex engineering onboarding with a lot of hidden knowledge
- Suboptimal developer experience
For many SMBs, the primary concern isn't rapid growth or highly dynamic load profiles, but building a robust, future-proof infrastructure that addresses these pain points.
💡 Solution Implemented by Unit 214
We advocated for migrating to a Kubernetes-based infrastructure as a foundational step to improve in multiple areas, addressing all the issues listed above. Key components of our solution include:
- Infrastructure as Code: Using tools like Terraform or CDK, we transform infrastructure management into a more manageable, version-controlled process.
- Integration of Managed Cloud Services: Utilizing managed services for Kubernetes, IAM and Compute frees up engineering resources and shifts the responsibility of resiliency to the cloud provider.
- State-of-the-Art Observability: Integrating cutting-edge monitoring and logging tools that work seamlessly with Kubernetes, providing deeper insight into application performance and system health.
- CI/CD Pipeline Update: Modernizing the continuous integration and deployment pipelines to support containerized applications, resulting in more flexible and efficient deployments.
We recognize that all of the above can be implemented in more traditional VM-based infrastructures as well, however, our experience has shown that migrating to Kubernetes helps customers establishing an improved mindset for making important modernizations. Furthermore, in our experience, the above solutions reach their full potential when used in conjunction with Kubernetes. Apart from that, Kubernetes' additional general as a cloud-agnostic and cloud-native runtime layer are still a benefit for SMBs, just not as important as the other ones in our project experience.
📈 Our Proven Track Record
Our approach has been validated by the successful completion of five major Kubernetes migration projects, each of which has resulted in:
- Significant improvements in the quality and documentation of deployed infrastructure, increasing adoption and confidence in the system.
- Increased feature development velocity by making it easier and more transparent to deploy new software releases across environments.
- Improved system observability, facilitated by easier adoption of state-of-the-art monitoring and logging tools.
✅ Conclusion
The journey for SMBs to modernize their IT infrastructure, particularly with Kubernetes, may differ from that of large global enterprises. However, the benefits of Kubernetes, ranging from improved infrastructure resiliency to an enhanced developer experience, remain universally compelling. Our experience shows that Kubernetes is not just a solution for large enterprises, but a transformative tool that can address the unique challenges faced by SMBs as well, paving the way for a more agile, efficient, and future-ready business.