Customer Concern:

The customer engaged Rabun Enterprise Solutions to provide a review of a Kubernetes architecture that was designed by the customer’s architecture team. The customer wanted to verify the design would meet scalability, stabilitity, and performance requirements.  The customer wanted the design verified before executing on a build-out of 12 datacenters and hundreds of kubernetes nodes. Rabun Enterprise Solutions provided a design document based on the customer’s architecture design.

Key Target Issues 

Various Kubernetes Components

 The customer had a design that required some tweaking on which components were to be utilized in the final kubernetes implementation.  If the customer chooses an engineered solution such as Openshift or Tanzu, then a reference architecture would be followed when deploying Kubernetes (K8S).  In this case, the customer wanted to roll their own Kubernetes cluster, which meant they would pick and choose which components of the platform to use and how to integrate those components.  Rabun Enterprise Solutions was able to provide valuable insight into which components were best of breed and the tightest and best integration.  This insight allowed the customer to roll out the clusters across 12 datacenters and focus on the workloads to run on top of those clusters rather than trying to figure out how to deploy the clusters and which components to utilize. 

Consistent Kubernetes PODS 

The customer required a concise design document to aid in deployment of kubernetes pods across 12 datacenters.  The customer is a service provider, so deploying the clusters in the same fashion across all of the datacenters was critical to minimize the upgrade and configuration aspects.  The cookie cutter deployment was essentially a reference architecture that the customer could follow and allowed for the customer to install, upgrade, and maintain easily using configuration management tools such as Saltstack.

DIY Kubernetes vs Vendor Packaged 

The customer wanted a DIY kubernetes deployment rather than a vendor packaged deployment such as RedHat Openshift or VMware Tanzu.  The customer, being a service provider, wanted to reduce costs as much as possible, but still be able to offer their customers a feature-rich platform that offered stability at a competitive price.  The challenge would be supporting the DIY solution as well as engineering the solution in-house rather than off the shelf.  Rabun Enterprise Solutions offers the customer engineering expertise for the deployment as well as upgrades and integrations. 

Solutions 

Kubernetes Design Document 

 The Rabun Entperise Solutions’ architecture team created a detailed design document that provided the customer a blueprint for kubernetes deployment. This document provided an architecture that allowed the various elements to be compatible and meet the networking, security, and systems requirements. 

 Customer workshops 

 The Rabun Enterprise Solutions’ architecture team led several customer workshops to gather requirements as well as drive agreement on the proposed solution options. This collaboration allowed the final design document to meet the various operational, engineering, design, security, and network requirements. 

The final design was a blueprint for the customer’s deployment team to follow and successfully deploy Kubernetes PODs across 12 datacenters. 

Conclusions

 The customer received a refined and succinct design document that allowed the customer to successfully deploy Kubernetes across 12 datacenters with peace of mind that the deployment components would meet engineering, operations, security and networking requirements.