Kubernetes More Than Scalability

Many people think about Kubernetes when they’re considering a platform that can handle huge amounts of traffic. That’s fantastic, because Kubernetes is the right tool to be thinking about there! But, there are some really good reasons to be thinking about Kubernetes even if the need to scale isn’t something that you’re worried about right now.

There are many benefits that come with running on Kubernetes with Edge Stack that provide a great deal of incentive to adopt changes that make workflow faster, safer and (wherever possible) automatic. Centralized control over routing, redirects, header and request manipulation keeps icky hacks out of code. The ability to easily spin up (and throw out) test beds for new ideas makes programmers happy. Folks see the reliance on continuous integration to facilitate all of this as a comfort, a seat belt - and not something just adding to their workload.

We realize that scale is, ultimately, something that everyone must think about, even if the need for it seems a bit far into the future. What we’d like to do is show you the benefits that come with scale on k8s with Ambassador Edge Stack that you might be able to use right now:

• There’s great incentive to adapt and stick with CI/CD workflows. Ambassador Edge Stack comes with a MicroCD Pipeline which is just enough continuous integration to manage your infrastructure in a versioned repository. But, there’s no reason to stop there! As teams see the benefits of automation, they embrace the safety and transparency that comes with it.
• Ideas become cheap to explore. Developers can quickly spin up a test environment to try something new and, if it works, quickly iterate on it to bring it into production. They can also throw the idea away completely with a few clicks and no worries about sunken costs. Many ideas take way too long to come to life, or never come to the surface at all, because there’s too much friction to try them. Eliminating friction with Ambassador on Kubernetes enables speed with safety.
• Self-service becomes safe. All routes, mappings, running environments, redirects, re-writes and all of the other bits that go into making your application and APIs run smoothly share a central source of truth. AEdge Stack further enables developers to really own the services that they build with a level of transparency and safety that makes all stakeholders happy. With critical paths of work automated, you eliminate even the possibility of a great number of mistakes.
• Microservices become easy to explore. Many of us know that 10-15% segment of our code base that is executed 90% of the time, while the other 85% sometimes struggles to run under the load. The solution is to decouple the parts that need more and use the right tools to help them run efficiently - starting with their own runtime, and possibly changing from an interpreted language to a compiled one. It’s easy to experiment with this and test new ideas using Ambassador Edge Stack on Kubernetes.

All of this is free to explore, right now.

You may not need to scale to hundreds or thousands of requests per second (though, arguably, that’s a great problem to have!), but you probably can make great use of many more features and workflows that come naturally with operating on a Kubernetes environment with Ambassador Edge Stack.

Want to dive in? We’ve got a quick start guide that can get you up and running quickly.

We’d also love to hear from you! Did you find the information above useful? Find us on Twitter