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Enterprise-Wide
Kubernetes
Adoption -
Principles,
Practices and
Processes
SESSION CODE (BP-1058)
By
Turja Narayan

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Turja Narayan
Chaudhuri
Assistant Director, EY GDS
turjachaudhuri@gmail.com
+91 78905885267
Introducing the speaker
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— Currently , I am working as an
Assistant Director, Cloud Practice at
EY (Ernst & Young).
— Before that I led the CCOE ( Cloud
Centre Of Excellence) Team at
Accenture.
— I Have around 10+ years of IT
experience , working on Public Cloud
technologies since 2017.

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Agenda: 1. Section I - Discuss standard k8 adoption process in
an enterprise.
2. Section II - Discuss issues/challenges in scaling k8
adoption across an enterprise.
3. Section III - Discuss potential/feasible solutions to
handle those issues/challenges.
4. Section IV - Discuss how a central excellence team
for Containers/Kubernetes technologies can operate.
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Discuss the current state of
kubernetes adoption at
typical enterprises.
Section I - Discuss
standard k8 adoption
process in an
enterprise.
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— Nowadays , most enterprises
are interested in adopting
Kubernetes.
— Kubernetes is quickly
becoming the de-facto
standard for deploying
applications in the cloud.
Kubernetes is everywhere
As per 2021 CNCF Survey, 96% of organizations are either using or evaluating k8
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— But , managing Kubernetes at “scale” , across hundreds of
projects/teams in an “enterprise“ is extremely difficult.

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— Multiple departments and locations.
— Hundreds of teams and departments across the
company , possibly globally distributed.
— You only know your direct colleagues well and
interact with a handful of people from other
departments.
— Everyone has clear responsibilities and
hierarchies.
To understand the context, we need to first define the entities.
First , how do we define an “enterprise” ?
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— Typically means at a rapid pace , across a large
number of entities.
— Refers to high pace / velocity also.
— In enterprise terms , it commonly refers to
initiatives that are undertaken across the
enterprise , typically involving hundreds of teams
and thousands of developers/engineers.
Everything breaks at scale, so we need to take a different approach/viewpoint
Second , what do we mean by “at scale” ?
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So , how are things operating today across many medium-to-big
enterprises?
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Discuss some of the
challenges that today exists
across enterprises who want
to adopt kubernetes and
container technologies at
scale.
Section II - Discuss
issues/challenges in
scaling k8 adoption
across an enterprise.
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The Great Kubernetes Divide
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— “Simplicity has not won. I
love Kubernetes, but it is not
for normal humans.”
- Docker cofounder
Sebastien Pahl
Kubernetes is really hard !
It is universally acknowledged that kubernetes has a strong learning curve for
developers/operators.
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But , scaling Kubernetes is much harder ! Why ?
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Discuss solutions that can be
adopted to increase the
adoption of k8/container
initiatives at scale, across
the enterprise.
Section III - Discuss
potential/feasible
solutions to handle
those
issues/challenges.
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Fortunately in Enterprise IT , most problems have solutions.
Some potential solutions are listed below -
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— Every single cluster provisioned should be
provisioned from the same
template/script/automation pipeline .
— There should be no deviation ( as to the basic
principles/attributes ) between two k8 clusters
setup in the same enterprise.
— No team should write their custom script to
setup/operate a new cluster from scratch.
The easiest way to embrace adoption of a new technology/toolchain is to enforce
standardization across all verticals within an enterprise
1. Standardization -
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— A mature enterprise should provide k8 cluster
creation and management/operation as part of
its IT Service catalog.
— Cluster creation and management should be
self-service , where a team can login to a portal ,
and select parameters to deploy a k8 cluster.
Automation should be in-built in the requisition process, and involve no intervention from the
product/operations team
2. Self - service
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Sample self-service catalog:

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— Multiple customers/projects within an enterprise
might need different k8 services.
— With that in mind , an enterprise k8 service
catalog might also be different .
— One offering could be a standalone k8 cluster (
AKS/EKS/GKE ) that is dedicated to a single
customer/tenant.
— On the other hand , some customers might want
to leverage a multi-tenant solution , where they
can request for namespaces within the same
cluster.
Need to provide enough options to the end-user to make the adoption initiative a success
3. Catalog of kubernetes offerings
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— No matter what you name it , there should be a
central team that manages , governs and is
responsible for Kubernetes workloads deployed
across the enterprise.
— This could include a support module ( for 24x7
operational support) or even a Solution
architecture module ( for design/ architectural
guidance).
A central team needs to be in-charge of the standardization and governance
4. Create a Container/ Kubernetes centre of excellence
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Functions of the central governance team :

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— The k8/container centre of excellence should
publish extensive documentation on how to
consume the enterprise k8 offering , how to get
started .
— Architectural best practices , detailed user-
manuals , tutorials , how-to-guides should be
published .
Good quality technical documentation is one of the primary drivers for increased adoption
across an enterprise.
5. Manage a documentation repository for k8 consumption
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— Cross cutting concerns that are applicable to all
projects within an enterprise should be managed
centrally .
— These might include backup , DR , compliance ,
policy management , etc .
A central team/governance unit should be in-charge of concerns that cut across teams or
entities within an enterprise
6. Manage cross-cutting concerns centrally
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xSL Functions of the central governance team :
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— There should be a central SRE/k8 operations
team that will manage/monitor all k8
installations/workloads within the enterprise.
— This could potentially include 24x7 support
models also.
— They will be responsible to ensure that the k8
platform is up and running.
No adoption can be complete without an offering of a strong operational support
7. Establish a consistent support model
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— Automation should be there not only to provision
the infra/cluster ,but also to build container
images ( say using Dockerfile ) , or deploy them
to k8 clusters ( say using Helm Charts )
— This automation should also be self-service or
well-documented modules that can be easily
consumed by anyone in the enterprise.
All phases of the software delivery lifecycle should be supported via automation
8. Automation to support containerized application development and
deployment
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— Security, like other cross-cutting concerns should
also be managed centrally; at least the ones that
are mandated by the InfoSec team.
— Policies should be pushed to all k8 clusters from
a central repository to ensure that all workloads
are safe and compliant.
— Specific customers can apply in-depth granular
policies, as an addition if needed also.
Security and regulatory compliance should be managed from a central governance unit.
9. Central governance and compliance
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How an enterprise should
structure itself to be agile
and responsive enough to
business and developer needs
by having a central team to
govern operations.
Section IV -
Discuss how a
central
excellence team
for
containers/kuber
netes
technologies can
operate.
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Structure the central container excellence team properly
This is one learning I gathered from my experience in trying to
increase container adoption across an enterprise.
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Provided we are successful in implementing our
solutions/strategies , how will a k8 consumption process look like
?
An optimal request lifecycle with central governance should look like
below.
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— Don’t just restrict yourself to k8
workloads , focus on the entire
developer experience around
k8 , starting from IDE to CI/CD
deployment pipelines.
— Get high-level leadership buy-
in , this will ensure that all dev
teams are aligned and focused
on this approach.
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— Try to make your enterprise k8
offering and associated
elements as cloud-agnostic as
possible – this will result in
wider adoption.
Some learnings :
Some tips on what practices and patterns can be followed that could potentially result in
successful adoption initiatives.

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