Kubernetes Reviews

We have many use cases for Kubernetes. We manage internal microservices, running MinIO from it which is a distributed storage solution. We have GitLab and many other internal tools that we've converted and set up to Kubernetes and microservices. Our users are mainly software developers who currently number around 60, but we're planning to increase to 100 users in the coming year. We are customers of Kubernetes.

A valuable feature of Kubernetes is its high availability. It's really scalable and more efficient for resource management on the bare metal server on which it runs as opposed to vSphere or pretty much anything else that we've tried before. 

The solution is still complex to manage. It requires specialists to the extent that I wouldn't be able to ask a junior employee to manage the software.

I've been using this solution for six months. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable, you can't get more scalable than Kubernetes.

Kubernetes is community-based so we don't pay for support. 

The initial setup is quite complex. 

The solution is free. 

This is a good product but because of the management complexity I rate it eight out of 10.

We use Kubernetes to provide distribution systems for storage and for the control plane manager.

Kubernetes offers a lot of great features such as scalability and great portability of applications.

I think that the GUI dashboard in Kubernetes is very simple and that there are no great options. Also, it is a very simple HTML GUI. So the Kubernetes community should provide a central and better GUI for managing pods and containers.

I've been working with Kubernetes for around two years.

Kubernetes is very stable.

It is very scalable. If you become a master in Kubernetes, you can provide great configurations to be scalable.

I have to install Kubernetes clusters based on the machines. I spent around one hour to install a Kubernetes cluster with three servers for the master node and around 50 servers for worker nodes.

I implemented it myself.

I would recommend Kubernetes, especially, to development teams and DevOps engineers. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at ten.

We are using it for hosting applications. Customers are hosted on the Kubernetes Service AKS.

They've introduced an enterprise option, which is quite helpful. 

It is always up to date. They're also automatically updating when the new version is ready.

There's a lot of community support if you need to get help. 

There are a couple of improvements there also need to be at play.

For example, if we deploy without RBACs to the cluster, it can't be deployed. When there's like GCPW or AWS, there is room. Even though we have deployed the clusters without RBACs enabled, we can add the RBACs later. However, Microsoft has limitations. There are features in Google Cloud or AWS that aren't in Azure. They need to implement a couple more tools in Azure. 

The application gateway, app gateway, needs to be improved. It's not fully developed yet.

I've been using the solution for around two years. 

The stability is good. It's always up to date and running well. There are no glitches and it doesn't rah or freeze. We did have one bug once however it has since been fixed. It is reliable.

We have 18 to 20 people using the solution and they are in DevOps. However, I've never tried to scale it. I'm not sure how well it would scale or not. 

We have used community help in the past and found it useful. They are helpful and responsive when you need to get a hold of them.

Positive

The deployment has a moderate level of difficulty. It takes around 30 minutes to 40 minutes to get everything up and running.

We pay a monthly fee in order to sue the solution. 

We're not a partner. We are end-users.

I'm not sure of the exact version of the solution we are using. 

Microsoft is hosted on their environment. We can't host it in our own environment. We are using the Azure Kubernetes AKS. If it's Azure, it needs to be hosted on its own Azure Cloud. We can't host it, for example, on-premises. 

I would advise potential new users to learn about it and try it out.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

We deploy microservices. We provide the screen namespaces. 

Kubernetes' integration with AWS Lambda is great. I barely had to write any code to connect from EKS to Lambda, so Kubernetes is programmer friendly.

Kubernetes could adopt UI-based approach. A UI-based approach would be really useful in the CI/CD pipeline. They should make everything a little bit more user-friendly.  For example, when I'm deploying, it would be nice to load my code and be able to see which components need to be connected. 

I've been using Kubernetes for more than two years. 

Kubernetes support is fine. That is not a problem.

Deploying Kubernetes is straightforward. Some are using GitLab. However, it does take a little bit of time, and it could be faster. 

Licenses for Kubernetes are on a yearly basis.

I rate Kubernetes nine out of 10. I would recommend it.

We are not using the Google version, but the open source Kubernetes.

This product can be deployed both on cloud or on-premises.

Our use case is mostly for multi-services or the applications which you will try to modernize. Investors will come from monolithic applications to mostly cloud-native applications. When I say cloud-native applications, that means each service component will be part of one container. You need a container orchestration or a management platform. So Kubernetes is actually a management or an orchestration platform for containers. Basically, it works with microservice applications.

One of Kubernetes' top features is its agility, it is very fast. You can deploy a container pretty quickly compared to a virtual machine. That is one strong feature. A second feature is its flexibility because you can use it on any platform. You can use it on Google or AWS or Microsoft or IBM or any clouds. So flexibility of deployment and agility are the top features. It also helps in your maintenance cycles when you do maintenance on your environment.

For improvements, I would say it's actually still evolving so they are already making a lot of improvements along the way. Each and every release comes with new features so I think they're doing well.

One feature I would actually like to see is the network monitoring part. When we talk about communities, it's mostly the computer side. But it does have some enhancements on the networking side which they have recently released. I would like to see more enhancement where we can monitor the networks of the Kubernetes cluster or the Kubernetes workloads.

This Kubernetes product is new so I would say I have been using it around two years.

I am using version 1.18, not the latest one.

Stability is still a question because it depends upon which flavor you're installing. It could be on-prem or it could be cloud, it could be open source. It's still debatable.

That said, stability-wise I haven't seen any problem myself up to now, but I might not be right. There are many other people who are deploying this in a production environment. I haven't done it myself in production so I would not be the correct person to answer that. But for me, I haven't found any stability issues.

Kubernetes definitely has good scalability. 

The number of users on it can vary. It can be used by very small organizations to very large and complex organizations. There is a customer I was working with who has more than 80,000 employees around the globe. But not everyone is a user of this technology. If you're asking about the users of this technology, I would say around 1,000 - 5,000.

Their technical support depends upon which flavor you're installing. Mostly, if you're going to the cloud version, support is definitely provided by the vendors. Like Microsoft provides its own support, AWS provides their own, and even IBM does the same. But if you're deploying on your own prem, that's where the question is. It depends. It's not a product sold by a single company, it's an open source, so big companies like J.P Morgan or Citibank have it deployed on their own premises and support will be their internal teams who will be working on that.

Installation is not a straightforward thing. It's a process that you have to follow step by step. On-prem is a little tedious because you have to spend some time to get this installed and create a platform. But people are mostly inclined towards cloud. They use Kubernetes on the cloud.

I did install it myself in my lab and the install itself doesn't take much time, about a couple of hours. But to go through the documentation takes time. You have to understand each and every component and then try to install that. So it's a combination of both understanding the documentation and then installing. Because it's a new technology, it does take a little bit of time.

It depends. If you talk to a customer and you get a project with them that they want to deploy, you're going to need a project manager or a technical architect, and then you'll need at least one or two guys who can do the hands on deployment. It's not a fairly large team, but you will need a project manager, a technical architect and an engineer.

There are different types of licenses. You have a subscription-based license if you are talking about cloud. This has both yearly or monthly available. Or you can go on number of workloads, based on how much workload you're putting on the cloud.

I would definitely recommend Kubernetes for others who want to start using it.

I would say it is no longer in its inception phase, but it is still in the early phase. The product hasn't matured enough. There are customers who are looking to take this maybe around two years down the line. On a scale of one to ten, I would give Kubernetes an eight.

We deploy our software solution in the Kubernetes environment. 

Honestly, there is not much I like about Kubernetes. It's very complicated to deal with. I just do it because I have to.

There is plenty of room for improvement with the configuration and runtime monitoring. That would make Kubernetes much easier to use. 

I have been dealing with Kubernetes for almost two years. 

Once you get it configured properly, it's a stable solution. The problem is that getting there is complicated.

Kubernetes is scalable, but again, it's such a complicated product.

I've never had to use the tech support.

I would not say that the initial setup is straightforward: the configuration can take me either 45 minutes or a week and a half. 

I try to do it by myself, but I often wind up having to look up directions.

I have not seen a return on investment with Kubernetes.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to modernize our IT landscape. We use infrastructure and platform surfaces for our data center. More recently we have added a container as a surface, which is this solution.

The easy deployment of containers is one of the main features I have found useful. In large scale developments, it is less hassle working with containers than virtual machines. It is easier to manage these containers instead of virtual machines, although there is a steep learning curve to graps the benefits of it.

This solution is not very easy to use. We are looking also for some tools surrounding this solution to manage the environment and to secure it better. These two are areas that have caused some issues. We want to integrate it with what you call continuous integration and delivery. 

It must be scalable, cost-effective, more agile when it comes to developing and managing the environment for DevOps. All these things go together, it must be cured to allow better manageability. That is what we all are doing in most large companies.

In a future release, the solution could become more like a core engine, in which tools like OpenShift are centered. You could see how all kinds of tools could help to better improve the management, security, or scalability of the product. Additionally, we will need more than the core in our organization, there needs to be more additional management tools moving forward.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

When it comes to my own environment, I have had no issues with scalability but it is not easy. This is just the development environment. Regarding my company, within my department, we are running a sandbox environment just for testing and that is going well. I am not sure how things will go if you go fully into production with this solution.

We will look for additional products to deal with the difficulties with scalability. There are several vendors that offer these products. Although this solution was made for scalability, it does not come out of the box this way.

We currently have approximately 30 users using the solution in my organization.

I am not aware exactly how the on-premises installation went for the IT team at my organization. For my local environment where I am testing this solution myself, the installation has been very easy. This is mostly because it is a local environment. We also have a cloud environment, where we have a hybrid data center and this cloud environment installation was fairly easy too.

The deployment was done by an internal team in my organization. 

Maintenance is required for all software versions. We need to manage different areas of the solution such as the cloud-native landscape tooling, registry, DevOps environment, and security toolings. There are three areas that need upgrades, versioning, scalability, and the toolset surrounding the solution. You can not run it on its own, you need additional tools. All of this maintenance is taken care of by our administration IT department.

The solution is affordable.

We plan on using the solution in the future. We are a large data center and we just need to have several options available. We need to have a traditional deployment of Infrastructure as a service, with virtual machines. We need also a platform as a service for very rapid and smaller applications and container management, container as a service which is this solution for all others. We expect that the virtual machines in the next 10 years will decrease and container-based services will increase.

I recommend the solution to others. It is a very good product and the strength can be that other vendors can create their security and management toolings around it allowing it to become a type of core engine. If those other vendors were not there, I think I would be more critical. Within my department, we were a bit late adopting the solution than other parts of the organization. We are still growing and experimenting, we have some clusters already in production. A lot of the product tools are open source which in some cases means the support is also not readily available. You have to adapt to it, but also be cautious when it comes to the support and the steep learning curve issues that you can expect.

I rate Kubernetes an eight out of ten.

We use Kubernetes for hosting microservices-based applications. Kubernetes varies depending on which distribution you use. We have distributors that make these custom distributions, and I don't have any special requirements.

I like Kubernetes' scalability, built-in redundancy, and ease of deployment.

I've been working on Kubernetes for maybe five years.

It depends on how you set Kubernetes up, but it's usually stable.

Community-based Kubernetes is quite hard to set up. We usually use a version of Kubernetes provided by some distributor because they have built-in assistance for the installation. It's much easier, and most of the installation is done automatically.

If it's a cloud-based solution, you just set up a cluster, then click a button, and it's done in 20 minutes. But if it's an on-prem solution where you have to configure the hardware and hypervisor, it can take longer. If you have a cloud solution, then it's just to a click of a button, but the on-prem version could be simplified.

I rate Kubernetes seven out of 10. More and more applications will be based on virtual machines using container-based solutions. That's the way forward, so I would recommend Kubernetes.