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Why I’m excited about Kubernetes + Google Anthos: the Future of Enterprise AI deployment | posts | /2019/04/24/why-im-excited-about-kubernetes-google-anthos-the-future-of-enterprise-ai-deployment/ |
Filament build and deploy enterprise AI applications on behalf of incumbent institutions in finance, biotech, facilities management and other sectors. James Ravenscroft, CTO at Filament, writes about the challenges of enterprise software deployment and the opportunities presented by Kubernetes and Google’s Anthos offering.
It is a big myth that bringing a software package to market starts and ends with developers and testers. One of the most important, complex and time consuming parts of enterprise software projects is around packaging up the code and making it run across lots of different systems: commonly and affectionately termed “DevOps” in many organisations.
The Role of Devops in B2C and B2B Software companies
DevOps engineers for consumer-facing software have a pretty tough job. They engineer and maintain complex pipelines of automation that take the latest version of the developers code, run tests on it and then build a smorgasbord of installers and self-extracting packages to work on Android, iOS, Mac and Windows (and probably some common flavours of Linux). There are sometimes platform-specific tricks that need to be carried out in order to get things running smoothly but thankfully these are less common when you’re supporting a limited set of operating systems.
DevOps for enterprise software is a different ballgame. Most enterprise software will need to interact with a number of external systems such as a relational-database-server for data storage or an enterprise directory service for company-wide security. Furthermore, these systems are often configured differently or running completely different products from organisation to organisation. When deploying enterprise software there are very real legal and internal/organisational rules about which systems can access each other, the flow of data between components and even whether new systems can be installed at all. Sometimes it takes months or years for DevOps to work with the customer and the development team to ensure that each environment is supported.
Docker and Kubernetes: A step in the right direction.
Docker + Kubernetes have gone a long way towards fixing this problem. Docker allows you to pack away your application code and all its dependencies into a self-contained, neatly packed little shipping container that is pretty much plug-and-play on any other system running the docker environment. If docker provides shipping containers, Kubernetes is the crew of the cargo ship that makes sure all the cargo gets to its destination and keeps the fox from eating the goose. Kubernetes organises containers so that those that need to communicate can do so and those that need to be kept isolated are secured.
Just as a consumer software package can be shipped as an installer package, Kubernetes + Docker allow multi-faceted enterprise applications with a number of moving parts to be shipped and deployed in a standard way too. Anyone running a compatible Kubernetes engine cluster can easily deploy self-contained applications to their systems and flexibly swap out components as per company policy (for example, they might switch the packaged database system for one already provided by their organisation).
Unfortunately customizability and configurability are something of a catch 22 in this scenario. Kubernetes configurations can vary widely from organisation-to-organisation and even vary quite significantly between cloud providers (Google Kubernetes Engine and Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Engine are vastly different in implementation and configuration).
At Filament we follow the Kubernetes community guidelines but many organisations still benefit from running Kubernetes without conforming to these guidelines. Some organisations may modify their setup due to governance and internal policies, others may be early adopters who started using Kubernetes before best practices were established and for whom changing their process may be an expense they’d rather not bear.
So, aside from making enterprise application deployment easier, why should organisations standardise their Kubernetes implementations?
Anthos: a great reason to standardise.
Anthos is Google’s new hybrid/multi cloud system that promises to allow developers to build and package enterprise apps once then run them in a hybrid cloud environment.
The benefits of a hybrid cloud are numerous. One of the biggest is that you can centralise and coordinate the management of your on-premise and cloud-based IT resources – reducing overhead in IT project implementations.Your high-volume systems can leverage rapid and dynamic scaling in the cloud whilst securely communicating with secure systems that keep sensitive data safely on premise.
With Google’s Cloud offering you get access to the Kubernetes marketplace with instant access to a vast number of instantly deployable enterprise solutions. Of course, as long as your kubernetes setup is roughly in line with the community best practices.
Google have also mentioned that Anthos will support other cloud providers such as AWS and Azure which is really exciting. Although the specific details of this statement aren’t clear yet, it may mean that even if your organisation uses AWS you might be able to leverage Google Kubernetes Marketplace applications. Of course the flip-side of this being that organisations that provide Google-Marketplace compatible applications might get deployment onto AWS and Azure for free.
Open Kubernetes standardisation, likely driven by Anthos uptake, is an exciting opportunity for enterprise software vendors and enterprise software consumers. With a standard Kubernetes deployment you’ll be able to quickly deploy vastly complex enterprise applications with ease across a number of cloud and on-premise environments and save days or weeks of headaches.
Filament are standardising all of our applications to use Kubernetes for deployment and we’ve seen some incredible time savings that we only anticipate getting bigger!
I think we’re likely to see most of the enterprise IT sector work towards standard Kubernetes deployment strategies in the next 5 years.