The technologies chosen by corporate IT departments today will have a long-term impact on their performance, operations, and overall strategy. Sometimes it takes more than a decade to realize the full implications of a technology solution. This can put a lot of weight on the shoulders of IT management, especially when it comes to emerging technologies whose usefulness, importance, and trajectory are not yet fully understood. Making the wrong bet on new software can lead to difficult integrations and disruptions across an organization's technology stack, which in the long run can lead to lost productivity, wasted budgets, and the likelihood of wasted money. land for the benefit of competitors. Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration platform, was until recently viewed the same way, and IT organizations were struggling to fully assess its long-term value. However, with Kubernetes now running 86% of container clusters, it has become the de facto standard for cloud-native infrastructure. This means that the main concern for IT departments is not whether Kubernetes has a future, but rather how to ensure that their Kubernetes implementation has a future that does not present an integration bottleneck. industry practices and use cases. This is where open standards, which codify how people implement Kubernetes and best practices, become part of the integration. Adhering to these standards can help prevent teams from running into unexpected implementation bottlenecks and ensure the easiest possible learning curve for new members of your DevOps teams. By relying on open standards—those that have been decided upon by the open source Kubernetes community as a whole, rather than a specific vendor—organizations can, at best, ensure that their Kubernetes implementations are what they are. efficient and well integrated as possible. To this end, organizations need to understand several things when it comes to open standards and Kubernetes implementation: consider the nature and limitations of existing standards; how standards can become fragmented within an organization; and the importance of working with open source communities to develop and maintain these standards.
Understand existing standards
Two organizations are responsible for defining the main open standards that govern the use of Kubernetes and containers, which are recognized by most vendors and developers. The first is the Open Container Initiative, which has developed image and runtime specifications for containers, regulating how the containers themselves should be packaged and launched. Making sure your containers are OIC compliant is a good first step in running any container cluster. The second is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an organization that promotes communities for cloud computing services and is also responsible for running the Kubernetes Certified Compliance Program, which tests vendors' products to ensure they meet security standards. a Kubernetes distribution. To build and run applications in modern environments, you need to augment the capabilities of Kubernetes by adding components such as microservices, service meshes, and APIs. Making sure that the products in your stack are compliant with the CNCF guidelines is the best way to ensure that everything in your Kubernetes implementation works as it should and is understandable by the community at large.Avoid standards fragmentation
To ensure that your Kubernetes implementation is compliant with open standards, your team must have a common understanding of their own implementation. One of the most common mistakes made by organizations, and one that undermines shared knowledge of industry standards and their implementation, is deploying multiple Kubernetes stacks that are not consistent with the same standards. There are several reasons why deploying incompatible Kubernetes stacks can contribute to the erosion of organizational standards. First, this arrangement can lead to a scattering or compartmentalization of expertise between teams working on different stacks, meaning that deviations from established standards in one stack may not be corrected in another. Another important reason is that once there is a difference between Kubernetes stacks within an organization, it can be difficult for an individual to follow each of their developments to ensure that common standards are being put in place. implemented and respected. Even a dedicated team trying to track down and ensure that all stacks are running to the same standards can miss small but important details, which can ultimately lead to one or more stacks deviating from organizational standards. Kubernetes is an open source project and the standards set by the OIC and CNCF are the result of discussions within the open source community. This means that understanding what is being talked about within the community and the concerns developers are addressing is essential to understanding how Kubernetes standards and its ecosystem will evolve, both formally and informally. In addition to codified standards, the open source community creates the opportunity to learn from many others what a successful implementation looks like. Your teams can follow best practices adopted by developers in other organizations, which can enable smoother integrations with other community-produced software. It also allows for a smoother learning curve for developers or operations teams when conducting research, thanks to a broader set of common practices. Finally, by participating in open source communities, your organization can help shape the development of standards for Kubernetes. Sharing your team's experience and ideas with the broader community can help improve standards. The choice to adopt open standards for Kubernetes is relatively simple. However, maintaining these standards requires constant vigilance and awareness. To adhere to open standards, teams need to be aware of the evolving nature of their technology stack while following relevant conversations within the open source community.- Erica Langhi is a Senior Solution Architect (EMEA) at Red Hat.