Meeting the Challenges of Multi-Cluster Kubernetes

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【51CTO.com Quick Translation】 As more and more aspects of people's lives move online, the need to massively expand the Internet is growing. This trend began many years ago and has gone through many iterations of technological advancement.

AWS launched in 2002 as the first public cloud offering, opening the door for enterprises to outsource IT operations and scale resource consumption up and down as needed. Virtual machines began to abstract application software from physical hardware and soon gained new deployment models.

Microservices are a collection of independent and loosely coupled services that can be maintained and configured independently of the environment. When packaged into containers, they can be deployed at scale and become the building blocks of a new generation of distributed infrastructure.

Different technologies such as Rancher, Docker Swarm, and Mesos competed for the lead in container orchestration. Kubernetes (open sourced by Google in 2014) eventually became the top choice for containerized microservices.

While enterprises clearly see the benefits of Kubernetes, its inherent complexity and steep learning curve make it difficult to adopt. Smaller companies lack the operational expertise and resources to successfully manage the technology, and larger enterprises struggle to integrate cloud-native tools and processes into legacy infrastructure.

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Dealing with the complexity of Kubernetes

Over the years, there have been several solutions that aim to help organizations adopt Kubernetes and optimize container orchestration . Rancher, OpenShift, and public cloud managed services such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Elastic Kubernetes Service, and Google Kubernetes Engine are some examples.

These solutions greatly simplify the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters, accelerating the transition to cloud-native applications while making them more scalable and resilient.

As a result, Kubernetes has seen widespread adoption. In 2021, Traefik Labs surveyed more than 1,000 IT professionals about their use of the technology. More than 70% of respondents reported using Kubernetes for business projects. However, enterprises that have just overcome the challenges of adopting container technology are now struggling to break through in scaling deployments.

As Kubernetes adoption grows, new challenges emerge. Enterprises support more and more Kubernetes clusters to meet the needs of more containerized applications. However, more clusters mean more components to manage and update. Problems that are relatively easy to solve in a single Kubernetes deployment multiply in larger multi-cluster environments. The complexity of Kubernetes grows as it scales. However, multi-cluster orchestration is inevitably the next frontier for engineers to solve.

Kubernetes multi-cluster requirements

Developers need the right tools to manage multi-cluster challenges, from contextual alerts to new deployment strategies and more.

• Federation tools. Federation tools provide a mechanism for expressing which clusters' configuration is managed and what that configuration should look like. A set of APIs in managed clusters can coordinate the configuration of multiple Kubernetes clusters across a distributed environment. Federation cloud technology supports the interconnection of two or more geographically independent computing clouds, making it easier for engineering teams to handle complex multi-cluster use cases.
• Connectivity. Maintaining multiple clusters and making them work together as a unit is complex enough. Connectivity makes it possible. The right tools can help take care of interconnections between clusters, control routing to clusters, load balancing across geographically distributed pools (using Global Server Load Balancing, or GSLB), and manage application updates across multiple clusters.
• Security issues. Security challenges are more complex in complex, distributed IT environments, but they can be addressed when adopting cloud-native security tools and processes. And this creates some new issues. How do you handle security issues in a zero-trust environment? How do you manage end-to-end encryption of connections? How do you control access to applications? How do you maintain TLS certificate management in a distributed infrastructure? Distributed applications become more secure when security is integrated into the cluster.
• Observability. Observability gives you a quick overview of your distributed infrastructure so you can diagnose problems quickly and easily. Grafana and Prometheus are tools that solve this problem. As you scale the number of clusters you deploy, observability and contextual alerts become more important because there are more ways for problems to occur. Having the right tools that allow developers to see exactly where the problem is not only keeps applications running smoothly, but also reduces a lot of guesswork and saves valuable time.

The future of multi-cluster Kubernetes

Ensuring that clusters, services, and network traffic work together seamlessly in a cloud-native world is a major challenge. Kubernetes has gained widespread adoption by organizations around the world, but the technology has naturally matured. With this maturity comes new problems and new challenges that become more complex in multi-cluster deployments.

Development, engineering, and operations teams (of all skill levels) who build and operate applications on Kubernetes need simpler ways to achieve visibility, scalability, and security for their clusters and networks. When looking for tools to manage standard microservices architectures, developers must prioritize solutions that provide capabilities such as instant observability, out-of-the-box contextual alerts, geo-aware content delivery, and a built-in service mesh.

The challenges of multi-cluster orchestration are becoming more common, but by adapting to the cloud native world with the right tools, development and operations teams will be able to tackle the complexity of multi-cluster Kubernetes and see the benefits of Kubernetes unprecedented.

[Translated by 51CTO. Please indicate the original translator and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]