INNOVATION

Interview by Alain de Fooz, Solutions Numériques

KUBERNETES... MANAGED, ON DEMAND

Businesses will reap the rewards of KaaS – Kubernetes-as-a-Service – the latest innovation from EBRC. This highly innovative solution gives developers added flexibility, while also being good value and highly secure.

Organisations working online now have no option but to adapt and innovate rapidly. Competition to gain and retain customers will continue to grow. To meet these business needs, technologies related to DevOps methodologies have emerged, notably cloud native tools such as Kubernetes. These tools supply the required automation and agility to the development teams so that they can continuously manage, adapt, test and boost the performance of their applications; and so meet the needs of Sales and Marketing teams, as well as those of the Security teams. Companies are then freed from the limitations of former development methodologies. There is no longer a need to plan months in advance relatively rare deployments. Upgrades are easy and can be carried out at any stage in order to securely support the business development. Easy

deployements at a lower cost: this is the key advantage of Kubernetes-

as-a-Service. “We help our clients achieve their development goals more quickly,” explained Yuri Colombi, Head of Solutions & Innovation at EBRC.

— FOCUS ON BUSINESS NEEDS

IN A CHANGING WORLD

“The only thing that is constant is change,” noted the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus 2,500 years ago. This time-honoured wisdom underlines the continual need for innovation by online service providers seeking to attract and retain clients. No longer can new applications take 18 months to plan and implement. They have to be continuously improving in order to offer new functionalities, to upgrade the interface, to fix bugs and patch security flaws.. Kubernetes accelerates each

stage of development and delivery by supplying the configuration tools

to meet the best practice. Thus developers can work with shorter, less restrictive delivery schedules which give the upgrades that the clients consider as useful. “Businesses which constantly review customer behaviour can thus quickly react and match the offer with the demand,” explained Gérard Miceli, Innovation Consultant at EBRC. Freed from various constraints related to application deployment, testing, and synchronisation with the production teams, efforts can be focused on

delivering the business functionality

operational teams need and expect.

— MORE EFFICIENT, COST-

EFFECTIVE RESOURCES

Therefore, rather than waiting weeks or even months to get the physical or cloud infrastructure required for the application, developers can benefit from a quick access to these environments on a self-service basis. The beauty of KaaS is that it is “agnostic” about the used cloud platform. Applications do not need

to be modified, regardless of whether the KaaS is deployed on-premises or

through the cloud. They can quickly grow without having to be defined again or having to rebuild the infrastructure for each new project. “Regardless of the underlying infrastructure, KaaS offers a management environment focused on the container. It orchestrates resources (computing, network, storage) for user workloads, while maintaining the portability between different infrastructure providers,” Gérard Miceli added. This also leads to the increase of speed frees-up resources. Large parts of the application portfolio can be upgraded even more quickly and at a lower cost; thus fostering business innovation by allowing key services to be presented in the form of application components.

EBRC DEPLOYS, HOSTS AND MAINTAINS

EVERY REQUIRED ASSET FOR KAAS TO WORK EFFICIENTLY.

— “AS-A-SERVICE” IS

AN ADDED DIMENSION

Nevertheless, this flexibility comes with its own challenges. The open-source Kubernetes community continues to develop and refine available tools and systems. Therefore, many DevOps teams have to be creative in order to get more rationalised, automated processes which are able to meet new deployment needs. That is why, the teams need Kubernetes “as-a-service” . EBRC deploys, hosts and maintains every required asset for KaaS to work efficiently. Thanks to EBRC, companies

can forget about the support-related constraints usually encountered with this kind of platforms. This enables developers to focus on innovation

and added value. “Large-scaled management of these systems, as well as ensuring timely updates of modules linked to Docker and Kubernetes can add a substantial workload, unless comprehensive external support is provided,” Yuri Colombi noted. “Hence the advantage of working in managed mode, which can be seen as an holistic approach to the management of containerised work requirements.” This is where EBRC’s expertise in operational management is valuable, where these needs can be met through Kubernetes as-a-Service. Actually, EBRC installs,

runs and manages the solution, while ensuring a SLA of some 99.9%

availability 24/7. Consulting services, in particular regarding the best practices of Kubernetes, are also delivered by EBRC. All day-to-day tasks can thus be handled without downtime, be they security updates, bug fixes and more.

— THE DATA ARE HOUSED IN

EUROPE, IN LUXEMBOURG

Based on the certified CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) Kubernetes distribution methods, Kubernetes-as-a-Service is a managed DevOps platform. This features hybrid cloud architecture, with on premise capacity and in control infrastructure located in Tier IV certified Data Centers in Luxembourg.

Data is therefore always stored in Luxembourg, thus setting it apart

from public cloud solutions. “The client can choose a service managed fully on the premises, or in a private cloud, or on the public cloud. All options are open to them,” said Gérard Miceli. “The operation mode is the same: no CAPEX, only OPEX.

Once Kubernetes-as-a-Service is deployed, developers no longer have to worry about the infrastructure and

underlying configuration. Applications have multi-cloud portability on public and private clouds.”

— ACCELERATE YOUR GROWTH

“Kubernetes-as-a-Service enables DevOps teams to offer clients the

autonomy they need to manage their CI/CD pipelines without any

restriction. The managed mode, based on the EBRC platform, enables them to focus on the work that is most important to them,” said Yuri Colombi. “Clients

concentrate on their business and

their innovation, while EBRC ensures that the KaaS platform is available and up-to-date.”