Invisible Kubernetes: Harnessing the Next Competitive Advantage in Platform Engineering

The transition from DevOps to platform engineering marked a shift in software development practices, introducing significant benefits to developers in accelerating application deployment cycles. Kubernetes has emerged as one of the cornerstones of this evolution, opening a new era in DevOps, as highlighted in this New Stack article. The article underscores how platform engineering has transformed Kubernetes into a self-service tool for developers, amplifying development speed and efficiency.

The journey of software development has seen several stages of maturity, but none have been more exciting and innovative than the era of DevOps. From the chaotic days of DevOps teams coupling together and experimenting with new technologies to a more standard approach, with harmonious integration of containers, storage, networking, and security running in cloud-native environments, commonly using Kubernetes as the orchestration platform. 

Platform engineering takes this to the next level. By equipping development teams with internal developer platforms (IDP), they provide an internal, self-service product, that includes all the tools and reusable services they need to accelerate their productivity.  However, many IDPs are purely focused on adding speed to the application delivery process and often have gaps that fail to address the “Day-2” Kubernetes operations work needed to ensure production environments are healthy, stable, and running efficiently. 

Day-2 Ops Work Diminish IDPs Value

Even though standardized platforms offer a simplified application release process, this doesn't ensure applications are running at peak performance and resilience.  A vast majority of IDPs are not equipped to ensure that applications, once deployed, will have continuous access to the required compute resources. This leads to performance and resilience issues that require time-consuming manual intervention that can end up slowing down the development teams. 

Additionally, as Kubernetes environments expand, platform teams find themselves collaborating more closely with business units. As a side effect, they face increasing pressure from FinOps teams to keep their environment’s costs optimized and under control to avoid eating into margins and impacting the cost of services. Many IDPs don’t provide the platform teams or developers with granular visibility into Kubernetes compute costs.  When they do, optimization processes are still time-consuming and can risk the application’s stability if not done safely. 

In essence, Kubernetes was selected for its dynamic resource allocation and scaling capabilities, but in reality, many platform teams still view optimal infrastructure elasticity as an aspirational goal. They grapple daily with manual resource adjustments to accommodate the dynamic nature of application workloads running on Kubernetes. This is ushering in a need for new tooling that can keep the environments continuously tuned, ensuring application performance and resiliency, and keeping costs as low as possible.

IDP Evolution: Abstracting Kubernetes Resource Management

As Platform Engineers work to better support the needs of developers and the business, they need to prioritize solutions that can help applications run with continuity and efficiency.  They need to eliminate manual hassles and constant adjustments by adding solutions to their IDPs built specifically to keep their environments continually right-sized and scaled.

PerfectScale empowers platform engineering teams by automating and intelligently optimizing resource allocation across their complete Kubernetes environments. It offers additional value to developers, allowing for speed and velocity in deployments, with the added assurance that their applications will have the resources to remain resilient and continuously available while causing minimal amounts of waste. 

The world of DevOps has experienced a paradigm shift. Whereas developers once had to master the nuances of Kubernetes, now we steadily removing the complexities so they just need to leverage it. PerfectScale furthering this progression by freeing up developers and platform teams from these daily right-sizing exercises, allowing R&D teams to focus on what they excel at – crafting exceptional applications. Additionally, the solution continuously eliminates cloud waste, preventing unnecessary overhead that can drastically impact the organization's business outcomes and profitability.  

In technology, ubiquity often leads to invisibility – an indicator of ultimate effectiveness. The New Stack article above uses semiconductors as an example; they're ubiquitous, yet rarely consciously noticed. This 'invisibility' is what PerfectScale aims to achieve with Kubernetes. We've made harnessing Kubernetes' robustness in right-sizing capabilities effortless, bringing a powerful component to your IDP that’s seamlessly integrated into your application delivery process.

So, give PerfectScale a try; it might just be your key to transforming the manual burdens of Day 2 Kubernetes operations, into an automated, invisible, yet powerful force that drives application resiliency while reducing costs.

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