Overcome the challenges
when using Kubernetes
1
5
Logging and Monitoring
In Kubernetes, a centralized logging and monitoring system is critical. With many services in play, you can’t just log into a server to view log files each time you need to troubleshoot an issue. To achieve this, you’ll have to consider additional tools and need to configure them to work with your Kubernetes cluster.
One benefit of Kubernetes is that it recovers from crashes. If for whatever reason the pods crash, Kubernetes will automatically restart them. This capability is great for end-users, but you still need a way to monitor these issues and, ideally, prevent them in the future.
2
5
Managing Resource Constraints
A major benefit of containerization is the ability to efficiently use computing power. To use this capability, you need to know how to configure Kubernetes to request resources on each pod. If you skip this step, you’ll put your application at risk of crashing because its containers failed to source enough memory or processing power. That will leave you with downtime and, potentially, dissatisfied end-users/customers and a loss of revenue.
3
5
Configure Networking
The first challenge with Kubernetes is your most important objective: to get a working application live on the internet. Yes, you can expose your application using node ports or load balancers. But if you require a more complex production-ready setup, you would install and configure an ingress controller on Kubernetes, automatically create hostnames in DNS, create SSL/TLS certificates, implement network policies, use an OAuth2 proxy for SSO, or even add mTLS between Pods. These are just a few examples of the enormous complexity introduced by Kubernetes.
We know DevOps teams like to select and integrate all the tools themselves and integrate them, but is your product owner willing to wait a couple of months before your application is up and running and securely exposed?
4
5
Managing Security
Security is a vital aspect of any DevOps team. Implementing security best practices can be difficult and time-consuming. Let’s look at some security controls that would require your attention:
- Identify vulnerabilities within container images and see whether they are fixable or not
- Isolate sensitive workloads
- Implement network policies to control traffic
- Implement secrets management
- Assess image provenance, including registries
- Enforcement of policies
- RBAC configuration
5
5
How Otomi Helps You Overcome These Challenges
Otomi offers an out-of-the-box enterprise-grade and production-ready solution that acts as an added-value layer on top of Kubernetes and offers a suite of integrated and pre-configured industry-leading open source applications, combined with automation and self-service.
Immediately overcome all the challenges DevOps teams face when deploying and managing applications on Kubernetes. DevOps teams will get access to all the monitoring and logging tools they need, can configure alerts to be sent to Slack or Microsoft Teams, configure resource constraints using a simple UI, expose applications securely (with mTLS) in just a couple of minutes and take advantage of all the security features including policy enforcement, image vulnerability scanning, and workload isolation. A new DevOps team can be onboarded in a couple of minutes and teams will then get their own space with all the tools they need.
Otomi is open source and can be installed on any Kubernetes cluster. Learn how to install Otomi on your Kubernetes cluster and how to use the Otomi UI and CLI
