1. Embracing Cloud Native as a User — and a Vendor
2. Bose: Supporting Rapid Development for Millions of IoT Products With Kubernetes
🔰 Research how Kubernetes is used in Industries and what all use cases are solved by Kubernetes
Challenge
A multinational company that’s the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, Huawei has more than 180,000 employees. In order to support its fast business development around the globe, Huawei has eight data centers for its internal I.T. department, which have been running 800+ applications in 100K+ VMs to serve these 180,000 users. With the rapid increase of new applications, the cost and efficiency of management and deployment of VM-based apps all became critical challenges for business agility. “It’s very much a distributed system so we found that managing all of the tasks in a more consistent way is always a challenge,” says Peixin Hou, the company’s Chief Software Architect and Community Director for Open Source. “We wanted to move into a more agile and decent practice.”
Solution
After deciding to use container technology, Huawei began moving the internal I.T. department’s applications to run on Kubernetes. So far, about 30 percent of these applications have been transferred to cloud native.
Impact
“By the end of 2016, Huawei’s internal I.T. department managed more than 4,000 nodes with tens of thousands containers using a Kubernetes-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution,” says Hou. “The global deployment cycles decreased from a week to minutes, and the efficiency of application delivery has been improved 10 fold.” For the bottom line, he says, “We also see significant operating expense spending cut, in some circumstances 20–30 percent, which we think is very helpful for our business.” Given the results Huawei has had internally — and the demand it is seeing externally — the company has also built the technologies into FusionStage™, the PaaS solution it offers its customers.
“If you’re a vendor, in order to convince your customer, you should use it yourself. Luckily because Huawei has a lot of employees, we can demonstrate the scale of cloud we can build using this technology.”
— PEIXIN HOU, CHIEF SOFTWARE ARCHITECT AND COMMUNITY DIRECTOR FOR OPEN SOURCE
Huawei’s Kubernetes journey began with one developer. Over two years ago, one of the engineers employed by the networking and telecommunications giant became interested in Kubernetes, the technology for managing application containers across clusters of hosts, and started contributing to its open source community. As the technology developed and the community grew, he kept telling his managers about it.
In the past, Huawei had used virtual machines to encapsulate applications, but “every time when we start a VM,” Hou says, “whether because it’s a new service or because it was a service that was shut down because of some abnormal node functioning, it takes a lot of time.” Huawei turned to containerization, so the timing was right to try Kubernetes. It took a year to adopt that engineer’s suggestion — the process “is not overnight,” says Hou — but once in use, he says, “Kubernetes basically solved most of our problems. Before, the time of deployment took about a week, now it only takes minutes. The developers are happy. That department is also quite happy.”
“Kubernetes basically solved most of our problems. Before, the time of deployment took about a week, now it only takes minutes. The developers are happy. That department is also quite happy.”
Still, Hou sees this technology as only halfway to its full potential. First and foremost, he’d like to expand the scale it can orchestrate, which is important for supersized companies like Huawei — as well as some of its customers.
Challenge
A household name in high-quality audio equipment, Bose has offered connected products for more than five years, and as that demand grew, the infrastructure had to change to support it. “We needed to provide a mechanism for developers to rapidly prototype and deploy services all the way to production pretty fast,” says Lead Cloud Engineer Josh West. In 2016, the company decided to start building a platform from scratch. The primary goal: “To be one to two steps ahead of the different product groups so that we are never scrambling to catch up with their scale,” says Cloud Architecture Manager Dylan O’Mahony.
Solution
From the beginning, the team knew it wanted a microservices architecture. After evaluating and prototyping a couple of orchestration solutions, the team decided to adopt Kubernetes for its scaled IoT Platform-as-a-Service running on AWS. The platform, which also incorporated Prometheus monitoring, launched in production in 2017, serving over 3 million connected products from the get-go. Bose has since adopted a number of other CNCF technologies, including Fluentd, CoreDNS, Jaeger, and OpenTracing.
Impact
With about 100 engineers onboarded, the platform is now enabling 30,000 non-production deployments across dozens of microservices per year. In 2018, there were 1250+ production deployments. Just one production cluster holds 1,800 namespaces and 340 worker nodes. “We had a brand new service taken from concept through coding and deployment all the way to production, including hardening, security testing and so forth, in less than two and a half weeks,” says O’Mahony.
“At Bose we’re building an IoT platform that has enabled our physical products. If it weren’t for Kubernetes and the rest of the CNCF projects being free open source software with such a strong community, we would never have achieved scale, or even gotten to launch on schedule.”
— JOSH WEST, LEAD CLOUD ENGINEER, BOSE
A household name in high-quality audio equipment, Bose has offered connected products for more than five years, and as that demand grew, the infrastructure had to change to support it.
“We needed to provide a mechanism for developers to rapidly prototype and deploy services all the way to production pretty fast,” says Lead Cloud Engineer Josh West. “There were a lot of cloud capabilities we wanted to provide to support our audio equipment and experiences.”
In 2016, the company decided to start building an IoT platform from scratch. The primary goal: “To be one to two steps ahead of the different product groups so that we are never scrambling to catch up with their scale,” says Cloud Architecture Manager Dylan O’Mahony. “If they release a new connected product, we want to be already well ahead of being able to handle whatever scale that they’re going to throw at us.”
From the beginning, the team knew it wanted a microservices architecture and platform as a service. After evaluating and prototyping orchestration solutions, including Mesos and Docker Swarm, the team decided to adopt Kubernetes for its platform running on AWS. Kubernetes was still in 1.5, but already the technology could do much of what the team wanted and needed for the present and the future. For West, that meant having storage and network handled. O’Mahony points to Kubernetes’ portability in case Bose decides to go multi-cloud.
“Bose is a company that looks out for the long term,” says West. “Going with a quick commercial off-the-shelf solution might’ve worked for that point in time, but it would not have carried us forward, which is what we needed from Kubernetes and the CNCF.”
“Everybody on the team thinks in terms of automation, leaning out the processes, getting things done as quickly as possible. When you step back and look at what it means for a 50-plus-year-old speaker company to have that sort of culture, it really is quite incredible, and I think the tools that we use and the foundation that we’ve built with them is a huge piece of that.”
— DYLAN O’MAHONY, CLOUD ARCHITECTURE MANAGER, BOSE
The CNCF Landscape quickly explains what’s going on in all the different areas from storage to cloud providers to automation and so forth. This is our shopping cart to build a cloud infrastructure. We can go choose from the different aisles.” — JOSH WEST, LEAD CLOUD ENGINEER, BOSE
In the coming year, the team wants to work on service mesh and serverless, as well as expansion around the world. “Getting our latency down by going multi-region is going to be a big focus for us,” says O’Mahony. “In order to make sure that our customers in Japan, Australia, and everywhere else are having a good experience, we want to have points of presence closer to them. It’s never been done at Bose before.”
That won’t stop them, because the team is all about lofty goals. “We want to get to billions of connected products!” says West. “We have a lot going on to support many more of our business units at Bose in addition to the consumer electronics division, which we currently do. It’s only because of the cloud native landscape and the tools and the features that are available that we can provide such a fantastic cloud platform for all the developers and divisions that are trying to enable some pretty amazing experiences.”
In fact, given the scale the platform is already supporting, says O’Mahony, “doing anything other than Kubernetes, I think, would be folly at this point.”
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