Within a couple months, they had a stable cluster for their internal use, and began rolling out Kubernetes for production. They also added Zipkin and CNCF projects
Prometheus and
fluentd to their cloud native stack. "We switched to Kubernetes, a new world, and we revamped all our other tooling as well," says Lynch. "It allowed us to streamline our process, so we can now easily create an entire microservice project from templates, generate the code and deployment pipeline for that, generate the Docker file, and then immediately just ship a workable, deployable project to Kubernetes." Deployments across Dev/QA/Stage/Prod were also "simplified drastically," Lynch adds. "Now there is little configuration variation."
And the whole process takes only five minutes, an almost 85% reduction in time compared to their VM deployment. "From end to end that probably took half an hour, and that’s not accounting for the fact that an infrastructure engineer would be responsible for doing that, so there’s some business delay in there as well."
With faster deployments, "productivity time is the big cost saver," says Lynch. "We had a team that was implementing a new file storage service, and they just started integrating that with our storage back end without our involvement"—which wouldn’t have been possible before Kubernetes. He adds: "When we started the Kubernetes project, we had probably a dozen microservices. Today there are twice that in the pipeline being actively worked on."