The Cloud Native Stack - Docker & Kubernetes

The Problem

A major US logistics firm pursuing a mobile-first digital strategy needed a modern and scalable back-end to support its microservices based-architecture to be developed on a public cloud subscription and be deployable to both test and production on that cloud.

Among the challenges that needed to be addressed were:

• Automated deployment of cloud network resources, security controls, load balancing, compute and database resources that minimized costs upfront then would quickly scale to meet production workload and security requirements.
• A CI/CD pipeline integration into existing Jenkins and Bitbucket toolsets to support rapid-cycle, test-driven, application development.
• The development team needed high cost efficiency during early development without reworking the deployment when the application was ready to move to production.

The Solution

After careful analysis, a solution was designed that consisted of:

• Infrastructure as Code deployed with Terraform to stand up Kubernetes with a small number of compute nodes for early development and a PaaS PostgreSQL database service.
• Kubernetes deployment files that define the application containers, load balancer configuration, and quantity making it simple for developers to control application response times — and balance performance against cost.
• All source code and configuration settings for the entire system are version-controlled; stored in a Git-compatible source-code repository and integrated into the company’s CI/CD toolset.
• A common container management process enabled Developers to use Docker Compose for local development.

The Result

• Deployed and operated the development environment at 1/10th the cost of production with no additional investment required to scale to production workload.
• Reuse of deployment code to construct environments that were not originally planned.
• Production containers on workstations sped up development and decreased production defects by enabling functional tests prior to code commit.