E-guide

Understanding
Kubernetes to
build a cloud-
native
enterprise
 E-guide

In this e-guide
For any enterprise wanting to revamp their infrastructure and
Kubernetes vs. Docker:
application estates to accommodate cloud-native computing,
What's the difference? an understanding of container technologies will be required.

Preparing for enterprise-class

Kubernetes, specifically, has rapidly become the go-to
containerisation container technology for enterprise CIOs who are looking
create microservices-based applications to run in private and
Anti-food-waste app Karma public clouds, as well as more traditional on-premise
taps up Google Cloud to
power global expansion plans
datacentre environments.

One reason why Kubernetes has become the dominant form of

container technology within enterprises can be traced back to
its open source roots and the fact that it is, at its core, a
Google-backed technology that is now maintained by the Cloud
Native Computing Foundation.

Interest in containers has also risen as enterprises have moved

to build hybrid and multi-cloud environments to run workloads
in, as the technology allows developers to package up an

Page 1 of 23
 E-guide

application (and all the dependencies that go with it), so they

In this e-guide
can run in any environment.
Kubernetes vs. Docker:
This not only paves the way for organisations to move
What's the difference?
applications from the cloud to on-premise environments (and
Preparing for enterprise-class
back again), but also frees enterprises up from having to use
containerisation specific mobile devices to run their applications on.

Anti-food-waste app Karma This e-guide looks at how enterprises are using Kubernetes,
taps up Google Cloud to while shining a light on the steps CIOs must take to make their
power global expansion plans
application and infrastructure estates container-ready.

Kubernetes vs. Docker: What's the

difference?
Bob Reselman,

Docker is a technology for creating and running containers, while Kubernetes is

a container orchestration technology. Let's explore how Docker and Kubernetes
align and how they support cloud-native computing.

Page 2 of 23
 E-guide

In this e-guide What is Docker?

Kubernetes vs. Docker: Docker is a technology that is used to create and run software containers. A
What's the difference? container is a collection of one or more processes, organized under a single
name and identifier. A container is isolated from the other processes running
Preparing for enterprise-class within a computing environment, be it a physical computer or a virtual machine
containerisation (VM).

Anti-food-waste app Karma

Docker technology has two main components: the client command-line interface
taps up Google Cloud to (CLI) tool and the container runtime. The CLI tool is used to execute instructions
power global expansion plans to the Docker runtime at the command line. The job of the Docker runtime is to
create containers and run them on the operating system.

Docker uses two main artifacts that are essential to container technology. One
is the actual container. The other is the container image, which is a template
upon which a container is realized at runtime.

A container has no life of its own outside of the operating system. Thus, in terms
of an automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD)
process, a real or virtual machine with an operating system must exist for
Docker to work. Also, that machine must have the Docker runtime and daemon
installed. Typically, in an automated CI/CD environment, a VM can be
provisioned with a DevOps tool like Vagrant or Ansible.

Page 3 of 23
 E-guide

In this e-guide What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes vs. Docker: On the other hand, Kubernetes is a container orchestration technology.
What's the difference?
Kubernetes groups the containers that support a single application or
Preparing for enterprise-class
microservice into a pod. A pod is exposed to the network by way of another
containerisation Kubernetes abstraction called a service. In short, the network knows about
Kubernetes services and a service knows about the pod(s) that has its logic.
Anti-food-waste app Karma
Within each pod is one or many containers that realize the logic in the given
taps up Google Cloud to pod.
power global expansion plans
Containers, pods and services are hosted within a collection of one or many
computers, real or virtual. In Kubernetes parlance, a computer is known as a
node. Kubernetes runs over a number of nodes. The collection of nodes is
called a Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes separates the node that controls activity in the cluster from the other
nodes. This boss node is called the control plane node. The other nodes are
called worker nodes. The containers that make up a pod run on one or many
worker nodes. Each worker node in the Kubernetes cluster must have a
container runtime installed.

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 E-guide

In this e-guide

Kubernetes vs. Docker:

What's the difference?

Preparing for enterprise-class

containerisation

Anti-food-waste app Karma

taps up Google Cloud to
power global expansion plans

For a long time, Docker was the default container runtime used by Kubernetes.
Today other alternative container runtimes such as containerd and CRI-O have
become popular.

Page 5 of 23
 E-guide

In this e-guide

Kubernetes vs. Docker:

What's the difference?

Preparing for enterprise-class

containerisation

Anti-food-waste app Karma

taps up Google Cloud to
power global expansion plans

Page 6 of 23
 E-guide

In this e-guide Kubernetes and Docker deployments

Kubernetes vs. Docker: Kubernetes deployments are versatile, scalable and fault-tolerant.In terms of
What's the difference? versatility, Kubernetes supports modifying or upgrading pods at runtime with no
interruption of service. You can set Kubernetes to add more pods at runtime as
Preparing for enterprise-class the demand increases, thus making applications running under Kubernetes
containerisation scalable. And, if a VM goes down, Kubernetes can replenish the pods and
containers automatically on another machine running within the given
Anti-food-waste app Karma Kubernetes cluster of machines. Hence, Kubernetes is fault-tolerant.
taps up Google Cloud to
power global expansion plans Kubernetes is a complex technology, made up of components -- also called
resources -- beyond pods and services. Kubernetes ships with default
resources that facilitate security, data storage and network management. Also,
developers can make custom resources in order to extend the capabilities of a
Kubernetes cluster to meet a special need.

Kubernetes vs. Docker

The important thing to understand about Docker and Kubernetes is that one is a
technology for defining and running containers, and the other is a container
orchestration framework that represents and manages containers within a web
application. Kubernetes does not make containers. Rather, it relies upon a
container realization technology such as Docker to make them.

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 E-guide

In this e-guide
Preparing for enterprise-class
Kubernetes vs. Docker: containerisation
What's the difference?
Adrian Bridgwater,
Preparing for enterprise-class
containerisation
Despite the option to move essentially ephemeral computing resources and
data between public, private and hybrid clouds, there is still an all-
encompassing push to deploy unmodified monolithic applications in virtual
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
machines (VMs) running on public cloud infrastructure.
power global expansion plans
However, it is more efficient to break down an application into functional blocks,
each of which runs in its own container. The Computer Weekly Developer’s
Network (CWDN) asked industry experts about the modern trends, dynamics
and challenges facing organisations as they migrate to the micro-engineering
software world of containerisation.

Unlike VMs, containers share the underlying operating system (OS) and kernel,
which means a single OS environment can support multiple containers. Put
simply, containers can be seen as virtualisation at the process (or application)
level, rather than at the OS level.

Those essential computing resources include core processing power, memory,

data storage and input/output (I/O) provisioning, plus all the modern incremental

Page 8 of 23
 E-guide

“new age” functions and services, such as big data analytics engine calls,
In this e-guide artificial intelligence (AI) brainpower and various forms of automation.

Kubernetes vs. Docker: Although the move to containers provides more modular composability, the
What's the difference? trade-off is a more complex interconnected set of computing resources that
need to be managed, maintained and orchestrated. Despite the popularisation
Preparing for enterprise-class of Kubernetes and the entire ecosystem of so-called “observability”
containerisation technologies, knowing the health, function and wider state of every deployed
container concurrently is not always straightforward.
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to Migrating to containers
power global expansion plans

“The question I am often asked is how best to migrate applications from a VM

environment to containers,” says Lei Zhang, tech lead and engineering manager
of Alibaba’s cloud-native application management system, Alibaba Cloud
Intelligence. “Every customer is trying to build a Kubernetes environment, and
the ways to do it can seem complex. However, there is a range of methods,
tools and best practice available for them to use.”

Zhang recommends that the first thing organisations looking to containerise

their VM stack should do is create a clear migration plan. This involves breaking
the migration into steps, beginning with the most stable applications, for
example their website, and leaving the more complex applications until the
container stack is more mature.

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 E-guide

According to Lewis Marshall, technology evangelist at Appvia, the mitigation of

In this e-guide risk alone is a huge benefit that seemingly makes the decision to containerise
legacy systems easier to make. “Using inherently immutable containers with
Kubernetes vs. Docker: your legacy systems is an opportunity to remove the bad habits, processes and
What's the difference?
operational practices that exist with systems that have to be upgraded in place,
and are therefore non-immutable,” he says.
Preparing for enterprise-class
containerisation
Three quick wins of rehosting
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to By breaking the containerisation process into manageable pieces sorted out by
power global expansion plans complexity, you can begin to prioritise quick wins and create a longer-term
strategy, says Jiani Zhang, president of the alliance and industrial business unit
at Persistent Systems. Here are three steps she suggests IT decision-makers
should consider when looking at containerisation:

• Rehosting: Look to apply the simplest containerisation technique

possible to get quick wins early. Rehosting, otherwise known as the lift-
and-shift method, is the easiest way to containerise your legacy
application and move it to the cloud. Rehosting can dramatically increase
return on investment in a short time. Not all applications can be rehosted,
but the earlier you start, the longer you can enjoy the benefits while you
spend time on the more difficult tasks.
• Refactoring: Refactoring is certainly more time-consuming than
rehosting, but by isolating individual pieces of legacy applications into
containerised microservices, you can get the benefits of moving the most
important aspects of the application without having to refactor the entire

Page 10 of 23
 E-guide

codebase. From a time and effort standpoint, it often makes sense to

In this e-guide only move the most important components, rather than the entire
application. One practical example of this is by refactoring a legacy
application’s storage mechanism, such as the logs or user files. This will
Kubernetes vs. Docker:
allow you to run the application in the container without losing any data,
What's the difference? but also without moving everything into the container.
• Rebuild: Sometimes you have to cut your losses and rebuild an
Preparing for enterprise-class
application that has passed its shelf life. Although this is time-consuming,
these are often the most expensive and least productive applications
containerisation
running on your system, and the work can pay off in the long run.

Anti-food-waste app Karma In Marshall’s experience, containers have the capacity to increase security while
taps up Google Cloud to decreasing operating and maintenance costs. For instance, some legacy
power global expansion plans
systems have a lot of manual operational activities, which makes any sort of
update incredibly labour-intensive and fraught with risk.
Marshall recommends that IT administrators try to ensure that the cost of
operating legacy systems trends downwards, towards zero. “If your system is a
cost sink while adding limited business value, then updating or upgrading it
should become your priority,” he says. “If your system is dependent on a few
individuals who regularly put in lots of overtime to ‘keep the lights on’, that
should be a huge red flag.

“It is also worth remembering that as a system ages, it generally becomes more
expensive to maintain and the security and instability risks rise.”

Page 11 of 23
 E-guide

In this e-guide Challenges of containerisation

Kubernetes vs. Docker: The immutable nature of container-based services, which can be deleted and
What's the difference? redeployed when a new update is available, highlights the flexibility and scale
they present. But, as Bola Rotibi, research director CCS Insight, pointed out in a
Preparing for enterprise-class recent Computer Weekly article, while containers may come and go, there will
containerisation be critical data that must remain accessible and with relevant controls applied.

Anti-food-waste app Karma

She says: “For the growing number of developers embracing the container
taps up Google Cloud to model, physical computer storage facilities can no longer be someone else’s
power global expansion plans concern. Developers will need to become involved in provisioning storage
assets with containers. Being adept with modern data storage as well as the
physical storage layer is vital to data-driven organisations.”

Douglas Fallstrom, vice-president of product and operations at Hammerspace,

says applications need to be aware of the infrastructure and where data is
located. This, he warns, adds to the overall complexity of containerisation and
contributes to the need to reconfigure applications if something changes. Also,
the idea of data storage is not strictly compatible with the philosophy of cloud-
native workloads.

“Just as compute has gone serverless to simplify orchestration, we need data to

go storageless so that applications can access their data without knowing
anything about the infrastructure running underneath,” he says.

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 E-guide

“When we talk about storageless data, what we are really saying is that data
In this e-guide management should be self-served from any site or any cloud and let
automation optimise the serving and protection of data without putting a call into
Kubernetes vs. Docker: IT.”
What's the difference?
From a data management perspective, databases are generally not built to run
Preparing for enterprise-class in a cloud-native architecture. According to Jim Walker, vice-president of
containerisation product marketing at Cockroach Labs, management of a legacy database on
modern infrastructure such as Kubernetes is very difficult. He says many
Anti-food-waste app Karma organisations choose to run their databases alongside the scale-out
taps up Google Cloud to environment provided by Kubernetes.
power global expansion plans
“This often creates a bottleneck, or worse, a single point of failure for the
application,” he adds. “Running a NoSQL database on Kubernetes is better
aligned, but you will still experience transactional consistency issues.”

Without addressing this issue with the database, Walker believes that software
developers building cloud-native applications only get a fraction of the value
offered by containers and orchestration. “We’ve seen great momentum in
Kubernetes adoption, but it was originally designed for stateless workloads,” he
says. “Adoption has been held back as a result. The real push to adoption will
occur as we build out data-intensive workloads to Kubernetes.”

Page 13 of 23
 E-guide

In this e-guide Management considerations

Kubernetes vs. Docker: Beyond the challenges of taking a cloud-native approach to legacy IT
What's the difference? modernisation, containers also offer IT departments a way to rethink their
software development pipeline. More and more companies are adopting
Preparing for enterprise-class containers, as well as Kubernetes, to manage their implementations, says
containerisation Sergey Pronin, product owner at open source database company Percona.

Anti-food-waste app Karma

“Containers work well in the software development pipeline and make delivery
taps up Google Cloud to easier,” he says. “After a while, containerised applications move into production,
power global expansion plans Kubernetes takes care of the management side and everyone is happy.”

Thanks to Kubernetes, applications can be programmatically scale up and down

to handle peaks in usage by dynamically handling processor, memory, network
and storage requirements, he adds.

However, while the software engineering teams have done their bit by setting up
auto-scalers in Kubernetes to make applications more available and resilient,
Pronin warns that IT departments may find their cloud bills starting to snowball.

For example, an AWS Elastic Block Storage user will pay for 10TB of
provisioned EBS volumes even if only 1TB is really used. This can lead to sky-
high cloud costs. “Each container will have its starting resource requirements

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 E-guide

reserved, so overestimating how much you are likely to need can add a
In this e-guide substantial amount to your bill over time,” says Pronin.

Kubernetes vs. Docker: As IT departments migrate more workloads into containers and put them into
What's the difference? production, they will eventually need to manage multiple clusters of containers.
This makes it important for IT departments to track container usage and spend
Preparing for enterprise-class levels in order to get a better picture of where the money is going.
containerisation

Anti-food-waste app Karma Anti-food-waste app Karma taps up Google

taps up Google Cloud to
power global expansion plans
Cloud to power global expansion plans
Caroline Donnelly, Senior Editor, UK

Food waste is a known contributor to climate change, and it is a problem

Swedish startup Karma is helping consumers and businesses tackle through its
food rescue apps.

The first of these apps is a consumer-facing offering that connects users to food
retailers in their area that have surplus stock that they can buy at a reduced
price so it does not go to waste.

The second app is for Karma’s retail partners, and sees the firm providing them
with granular feedback on the stock level changes they can make to reduce the

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 E-guide

amount of surplus food they have each day, as well as providing a means of
In this e-guide selling on any excess that does accrue.

Kubernetes vs. Docker: The fact that it can advise its retailers in this way is an important point of
What's the difference? competitive difference for Karma, the firm’s brand manager Charlotte
Humphries tells Computer Weekly, and it is down to the way it processes its
Preparing for enterprise-class sales data.
containerisation
“It’s really important to us as a way to stand out and be distinct versus the other
potential food waste companies that are out there as well,” she says. “We have
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
a direct competitor that is not able to do such a thing because they don’t sell
power global expansion plans item by item on the app. They sell a ‘mystery bag of food items’ for less at the
end of the day.

“By selling item by item and by using machine learning, we’re able to offer a
solution that actually stops the symptoms of food waste through redistribution,
and the cause of food waste, which is overproduction,” she adds.

The company is in the process of building out its presence in the UK and
France, having already established itself in its native Sweden. It claims to have
saved more than four million meals from going to waste since its launch in 2016.

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 E-guide

In this e-guide Enabling growth

Kubernetes vs. Docker: Karma did not initially start out as an app solely dedicated to addressing the
What's the difference? issue of food waste, Elsa Bernadotte, the firm’s co-founder and chief product
officer tells Computer Weekly.
Preparing for enterprise-class
containerisation “Like most good ideas, it started out in 2015 as a not-so-good idea, and for the
first eight to nine months we used to say it was a failure. At that time, it was a
Anti-food-waste app Karma
deals platform, and a bit like a crowdsourced Groupon [service],” she says.
taps up Google Cloud to
“By selling item by item and by using machine learning, we’re able to offer a solution
power global expansion plans
that actually stops the symptoms of food waste through redistribution, and the cause of
food waste, which is overproduction”

Charlotte Humphries, Karma

The company soon reached a “sink or swim crunch point” with the app, which
prompted a decision by the team to make more of one of its best-performing
features – its meal deals – and seize on that to tackle food waste. Three weeks
after that decision was made, Karma in its current form was born.

“Once we started looking deeper into the environmental implications of food

waste, and we understood just how vast and monumental the problem of food
waste really was and still is, it then became our ambition to solve one of the
world’s largest climate issues using technology,” says Bernadotte.

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 E-guide

After several years of steady growth in Sweden, the company secured

In this e-guide additional investment through a funding round that would pave the way for the
company to expand its operations to the UK and France in late 2018.
Kubernetes vs. Docker:
What's the difference? But before the company could do that, it needed to address some shortcomings
in the app’s underlying infrastructure that had emerged, which had the potential
Preparing for enterprise-class to stunt Karma’s international growth and its ability to innovate. This, in turn,
containerisation prompted the firm to embark on a shake-up of its infrastructure.

The source of its technology issues lay in its reliance on a simple-to-use bare
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
metal infrastructure that required a lot of expensive manual handling and
power global expansion plans maintenance. So much so that keeping it up and running required three full-time
DevOps engineers, which is a sizeable overhead for a startup to bear, says
Karma product manager Koen Brörmann.

“When we started expanding internationally, our infrastructure became a

bottleneck – from a scalability, innovation and delivery perspective. We had a
large DevOps team of three people dedicated to maintaining that,” he says.
“What we had was working, but there was so much manual work involved that it
felt prohibitively slow.”

For example, if the company wanted to ship an update to the application, that
would require logging into a remote server, pulling in new code, followed by a
manual restart of the program using a node process manager.

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 E-guide

“We had a really bifurcated setup where you had a DevOps team and an
In this e-guide engineering team, and we wanted to move to a situation where our engineers
are also responsible for the delivery and maintenance of the infrastructure,”
Kubernetes vs. Docker: adds Brörmann.
What's the difference?
“We wanted a setup that would not only allow us to move really fast [from an
Preparing for enterprise-class innovation perspective], but also give our engineers ownership.”
containerisation
Up in the clouds
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
With the help of its newly acquired investors, the company set about scouring
power global expansion plans
the market for a public cloud provider that could help it simplify the management
of its infrastructure operations, before deciding on the Google Cloud Platform
(GCP).

The migration took around 12 months, with Brörmann crediting a company

decision made prior to the move to transition its application over to a
microservices-based architecture with helping make the shift to GCP a very
smooth process.

“In about six months, we were 80% done [with the migration] and the last 20%
took another three to six months, but we were able to move over fairly quickly
due to our microservices setup,” he says.

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 E-guide

As part of the migratory process, the firm set about replicating the app using the
In this e-guide Google-developed open source container-based technology Kubernetes, which
in turn led to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) forming the core of its revamped
Kubernetes vs. Docker: infrastructure.
What's the difference?
GKE is billed by Google Cloud as a fully managed Kubernetes service that
Preparing for enterprise-class provides enterprises with an autopilot-like mode of operation, which the Karma
containerisation team said helped it achieve its goal of simplifying its operations management
processes.
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
It has since sought to automate the management of its infrastructure further by
power global expansion plans leaning on Google Cloud Functions and Google Cloud Run, while the migration
also saw it start tapping into Google BigQuery to aid the management of its app
databases.

“I was really excited about BigQuery because I come from a traditional

background where there was a whole data management team, and if I had a
request, I had to send it to them, they would write a query, get the data and give
that to me,” says Brörmann.

“So I was excited to be able to manage all that data live and get access to it
directly myself – and 80% of the team can get the data they want too. That has
allowed us to move even faster than we did before, while remaining data-
driven,” he adds.

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 E-guide

As an example of this, Brörmann cites how quickly the company was able to
In this e-guide expand the takeaway functionality of its apps in response to the onset of the
Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020 to include delivery options as
Kubernetes vs. Docker: well.
What's the difference?
“We were able to pivot to delivery super fast. I was blown away by how fast we
Preparing for enterprise-class had something not just built, but rolled out and [live] the next day,” he says.
containerisation
A proactive approach
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
The move to GCP also brought uptime improvements, and the Google team is
power global expansion plans
proactive in helping Karma’s engineers find new ways to expand the
functionality of its apps so the company can do more to help its retail partners
address the causes of food waste, adds Brörmann.

To this point, he shares an example whereby Google’s engineers provided the

Karma team with a walkthrough of how using its BigQuery ML tool would enable
the startup to create and deploy machine learning (ML) models using standard
SQL database queries that would help retailers tweak their stock levels to
prevent food waste.

“We knew that BigQuery ML was available, but we hadn’t found a way to use it
at that point, so Google approached us and said, ‘We can do a small slide deck
presentation and walk you through what the opportunities are’,” says Brörmann.

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 E-guide

“We had three of our engineers talk to one of the Google people about that, and
In this e-guide based on that talk we started using BigQuery ML, which has opened up a lot of
avenues for us with prediction and prevention of food waste, which are areas
Kubernetes vs. Docker: we want to do more with in the future.”
What's the difference?
Specifically, BigQuery ML is currently being used by Karma to provide its retail
Preparing for enterprise-class partners with an indication of how high or low their foot traffic is likely to be in
containerisation the coming days so they can prepare more or less food depending on what the
data tells them.
Anti-food-waste app Karma
taps up Google Cloud to
Looking ahead, the company is hoping to do more with the GCP portfolio of
power global expansion plans artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools to refine its operations
further, which includes tapping into its Vision AI image recognition tool to enable
restaurant partners to upload their menu data to the app far more quickly.

“We want to scale faster and add more businesses to the platform, so we’re
experimenting with using Vision AI so our partners can take pictures of the
menu and all the data from that will be in the app within 10 seconds, whereas at
the moment that takes 30 minutes or so,” says Brörmann.

The Karma team also has aspirations to take the brand worldwide, which is
something that will be made far easier by the fact Google has datacentre
regions in the US, Europe and Asia too.

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 E-guide

“With Google, you don’t really have to worry about it not having availability in
In this e-guide other countries, so that’s definitely a load off our mind for the future,” adds
Brörmann.
Kubernetes vs. Docker:
What's the difference?

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