• Jonathan Shanks, CEO and co-Founder at Appvia


• 04.08.2020 09:30 am
Kubernetes

The incredible rise of the fintech sector over the past few years has brought with it some huge innovations behind the scenes. Kubernetes, a technology you’ve probably seen but might not understand, is one of the most important infrastructure technologies - without it, we wouldn’t have seen anywhere near the level of progress that we have.

Kubernetes, which is Greek for pilot or helmsman - a very apt term for what it does, was originally developed by Google in 2014, before being given to the community as an open source project. Since then, it has been adopted into the technology stacks of global banks, nimble start-ups, and a host of companies in between. 

What’s driven the use of Kubernetes?

In simple terms, Kubernetes is a product that manages the application lifecycle defined by the developers so that they can effectively scale up and down on demand, restart on failure and upgrade in an automated way, removing operational disruption.

This has become particularly important over the past decade, as financial services companies have been restricted by managing on-premise infrastructure, in-house customised scripts, code and ad-hoc tools to achieve a similar goal, limiting their capacity to keep up with a fast paced market.t. Customers have acclimated to the modern technology world of everything being at their fingertips, from buying and selling locally, sharing their own content and managing their finances in a way that makes sense to them as a user

This led to the adoption of mobile banking and applications to serve customers, which required the cloud for deployment at a wide enough scale to serve a mass market consumer base. As that market developed, the industry also needed a way to efficiently manage and deploy these applications and the services that run them - enter Kubernetes.

A platform for innovation

While Kubernetes has a great use case as an infrastructure tool, it’s widespread adoption has also helped the industry to innovate. Kubernetes allows teams to deploy new ideas quickly, as a series of microservices - essentially lots of small building blocks which make up the bigger application. Crucially, it also means that different parts of an application can be updated or taken offline without the entire service going down.

This approach empowers development teams to rapidly build and test new ideas easily without the delays of traditional infrastructure provisioning and orchestration Developers can iterate on microservices simply and independently and validate through A/B testing whether it offers the business and user value they anticipated quickly, to drive further direction and investment. 

A robust platform for a new world of challenges

The news has been filled with stories of tech services, especially those that have rapidly become vital to our lives, going offline, or worse - suffering a cyber attack. For any CTO or CIO today, building secure, robust platforms is the name of the game.

Kubernetes and supporting ecosystem tools can help with this challenge. First, if you design appropriately you can have a healthy disaster recovery solution so you can distribute workloads across multiple Data centres or replicate data accordingly to be able to re-route traffic in the event of a cloud region or on-premise data centre failure. Second, by automating the setup of your Kubernetes deployments, you can both ensure developers have the necessary power to run and deploy as they need, but also keep a tight control over security protocols and access rights.