Kubernetes has the opportunity to be the new cloud platform

Box Case Study

Challenge

Founded in 2005, the enterprise content management company allows its more than 50 million users to manage content in the cloud. Box was built primarily with bare metal inside the company’s own data centers, with a monolithic PHP code base. As the company was expanding globally, it needed to focus on “how we run our workload across many different cloud infrastructures from bare metal to public cloud,” says Sam Ghods, Cofounder and Services Architect of Box. “It’s been a huge challenge because of different clouds, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces.

Solution

Over the past couple of years, Box has been decomposing its infrastructure into microservices, and became an early adopter of, as well as contributor to, Kubernetes container orchestration. Kubernetes, Ghods says, has allowed Box’s developers to “target a universal set of concepts that are portable across all clouds.

Impact

Before Kubernetes,” Ghods says, “our infrastructure was so antiquated it was taking us more than six months to deploy a new microservice. Today, a new microservice takes less than five days to deploy. And we’re working on getting it to an hour.

In fact, that’s what he envisions across the industry: Ghods predicts that Kubernetes has the opportunity to be the new cloud platform. Kubernetes provides an API consistent across different cloud platforms including bare metal, and “I don’t think people have seen the full potential of what’s possible when you can program against one single interface,” he says. “The same way AWS changed infrastructure so that you don’t have to think about servers or cabinets or networking equipment anymore, Kubernetes enables you to focus exclusively on the containers that you’re running, which is pretty exciting. That’s the vision.”

Ghods points to projects that are already in development or recently released for Kubernetes as a cloud platform: cluster federation, the Dashboard UI, and CoreOS’s etcd operator. “I honestly believe it’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen in cloud infrastructure,” he says, “because it’s a never-before-seen level of automation and intelligence surrounding infrastructure that is portable and agnostic to every way you can run your infrastructure.”

Box, with its early decision to use bare metal, embarked on its Kubernetes journey out of necessity. But Ghods says that even if companies don’t have to be agnostic about cloud providers today, Kubernetes may soon become the industry standard, as more and more tooling and extensions are built around the API.

“The same way it doesn’t make sense to deviate from Linux because it’s such a standard,” Ghods says, “I think Kubernetes is going down the same path. It is still early days — the documentation still needs work and the user experience for writing and publishing specs to the Kubernetes clusters is still rough. When you’re on the cutting edge you can expect to bleed a little. But the bottom line is, this is where the industry is going. Three to five years from now it’s really going to be shocking if you run your infrastructure any other way.”