HomePortfolioFour Stories of Kubernetes Cluster Maturity: from Novice to Advanced

Four Stories of Kubernetes Cluster Maturity: from Novice to Advanced

Kubernetes
Information technology
Supply chain
Azure
Cloud-Native

Organizations of varying scale may face different challenges when adopting Kubernetes. In order to address these issues, it is critical to identify where you are in the process of adoption and what your specific deployment requirements are. After years of designing solutions for F500 and G2000 customers, Altoros has developed a Kubernetes maturity model, which can be used to assess how further along an organization is in platform maturity. In this document, we exemplify four real-world scenarios of how maturity assessment helped customers in the supply chain and technology industries optimize their Kubernetes clusters.

Four Stories of Kubernetes Cluster Maturity: from Novice to Advanced

How maturity assessment improves deployments

The maturity model involves an evaluation that is comprised of 25 parameters, including platform design, infrastructure, security, operator and developer skills, etc. Using the maturity model, Altoros provides customers with an accurate assessment of where they are currently at in terms of Kubernetes adoption, as well as a roadmap for improvement.

A sample workflow may include:

  • conducting two discovery sessions to get an understanding of the customer’s current level of adoptions and where they want to go based on all 25 parameters of the maturity model
  • compiling all the findings in a extensive report, including top recommendations, a detailed roadmap for improving all the points in the maturity model, and long-term improvements
  • running hands-on training to help customers implement the recommendations included in the report

#1. Novice: a blockchain platform provider gains hands-on experience

The organization is a blockchain platform operator with 160+ customers and 410 employees across North America and Europe. The company is a Day 0 customer with no experience working on a cloud platform. As such, the blockchain platform operator’s priorities leaned towards:

  • learning about the Kubernetes platform and how secure it is
  • identifying how existing processes may change and how to manage resources
  • estimating how much effort it would take to migrate to Kubernetes
gains hands-on experience

Since the organization had no prior experience with Kubernetes, Altoros recommended and provided hands-on training, giving valuable insights into the platform.

#2. Beginner: an electronic data interchange shifts to microservices

The customer provides supply chain data services, offering 4 products and employing 350 employees across 3 locations in the United States. The company had just started using Kubernetes for six months. They wanted to transition a monolithic application into microservices and manage these with Kubernetes. With only a few months of experience with Kubernetes, the customer prioritized Day 1 concerns, such as:

  • writing cloud-native applications
  • implementing monitoring and logging
  • getting developers to be more involved
electronic data interchange shifts to microservices

Working with Altoros, the customer switched from on-premises Kubernetes to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This automatically resolved many security issues present in stock Kubernetes. Additionally, our team addressed one critical issue, 11 security issues, and 6 performance issues.

#3. Intermediate: a SaaS provider gains high availability and elasticity

The company is a security software as a service (SaaS) provider. The organization has 250 employees serving 160 customers across 3 locations in North and South America. The provider wanted to ensure their applications could properly scale up/down. The company also needed monitoring and logging to identify problems with their applications before critical issues occur. The customer’s interests also covered Day 2 operations, which include:

  • ensuring compliance requirements are met
  • troubleshooting applications in Kubernetes
a SaaS provider gains high availability and elasticity

To minimize downtime, Altoros delivered a detailed roadmap for implementing business continuity, disaster recovery, and high availability. Our experts also provided insights into capacity planning, as well as suggested application performance management solutions with monitoring and logging. Furthermore, developers at Altoros resolved 4 security issues.

#4. Advanced: a wholesale distributor cuts operational costs

The customer is a large wholesale distributor that also offers supply chain management services. The company has 8,000 employees serving 150,000 customers across 275 locations in North America. The distributor wanted to migrate to AKS in order to reduce operational expenses. Since the company was coming from a completely different platform, their interests included:

  • managing the AKS platform and maximizing the use of services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Key Vault, Azure API Management, and Azure DevOps
  • gaining more control over customer-facing APIs
a wholesale distributor cuts operational costs

With assistance from Altoros, the distributor migrated to AKS and adopted Azure managed services. With this, the customer reduced their operational costs by eliminating the licenses for products they previously used. Additionally, Kubernetes engineers at Altoros fixed five medium-priority security issues and three performance issues.

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Ryan Meharg

Ryan Meharg

Technical Director

ryan.m@altoros.com650 265-2266

4900 Hopyard Rd. Suite 100 Pleasanton, CA 94588