2. What is Kubernetes? (Luca Ravazzolo)

Speaker 0 00:01 Welcome to data points, a podcast by InterSystems learning services. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app such as Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google play or Stitcher. You can do this by searching for data points and hitting that subscribe button. My name is Derek Robinson and on today's episode I'll chat with Luca rev, azolla product manager for cloud and containers at InterSystems about Kubernetes Speaker 1 00:25 <inaudible>. Speaker 2 00:39 Welcome to episode two of data points by InterSystems learning services. My name is Derek Robinson. As you may have heard in episode one, we're excited about the launch of this podcast and we've already released three episodes for you to check out. In this episode I'll be talking Coobernetti's with Luca Ravis, ALO. Luca is a product manager here at InterSystems, focused on the area of cloud and containers. He brings a ton of experience to the table. He celebrated 30 years at inner systems this past fall. Well, you're going to hear about Kubernetes really builds off of the concept of using Docker containers. I'm sure we'll have episodes covering Docker concepts in the future, but for now, definitely browse our learning catalog for starter information. About containers, if you're interested in them. Kubernetes is one of these newer technologies that really allows you to take your container approach to the next level. Rather than diving into those details, I'll leave the real explanation to the expert. So here's my interview with Luca. Speaker 2 01:38 Alrighty. So welcome to the podcast, Luca Revis, solo product manager for cloud and containers here at inter-system. BlueKai you doing? I'm doing very well from there. Okay. How are you doing? Good. Good. So we're happy to have you on the podcast here today and we're going to be talking about a pretty cool, a fairly new cloud topic today, which is Coobernetti's. So, um, I know that you've done some stuff on this at our global summit, our InterSystems here, and uh, there's a lot of cool stuff to talk about. So why don't we start with, for the new person, for someone who might not understand what this technology is, what is Kubernetes in, in brief, Speaker 4 02:06 in brief? Well, community is a platform, first of all. Uh, what does that mean? It means that it is, it is a four, um, a full suite of software if you like, that holds, that can hold up your application. Um, what does that mean in a little bit more details? Um, well, uh, it allows you to define, uh, how your application is going to run and uh, considered that, uh, even cloud service providers, right? Like, uh, AWS, Amazon, right, and Google and Microsoft Azure. They all have an implementation or support Cuban natives. But why is that interesting? Well, because, because a two factor thing, one is decubitus was born to make sure that your application runs all the time. That's his job. It keeps monitoring that all the workloads that you put up there are actually running all the time. And um, and if anything dies, we picked her up again. Speaker 4 03:00 Right? So it looks at your definition says that's what you want me to run. You want me to run your 32 instances of, of this app and, and if 31 are running now, well is going to pick that 32nd and make sure that it does run. Um, and the second, second part of the why in Cuban it is interesting is because he allows you to define all the pieces of an application. If, so, let me just say, if you have like the front end or pages of an application, that's interesting. There's only a part of it. You need some business logic behind it, right? And if you have developer, the business logic only, that's only part of it. You need somewhere where to store information, for example, if you're a of the purchases that somebody is doing, right? Um, so you need a database on the backend. Speaker 4 03:42 So, and then, um, if it's black Friday, what do you do? Well, you need to make sure that he sustained the new mem biggest and largest workload that you have. And so you need to dynamically, you know, um, um, create more web servers, et cetera, et cetera. What Cubanetis can do all that metal, not only that allows to actually define all of those pieces, all those components and even load balancers and web servers and DNS, uh, engines, insight, insight, this, the platform itself. And so it really allows you to define the application, how the application has to run and as very powerful, we do not have anything like that in the market right now. Speaker 2 04:22 Yeah, that's really cool. So I think, um, one of the, and we won't cover this in this episode, but one of the precursors to this technology is really understanding containers and Docker containers and kind of having that deployment. Right. And so me personally, I've worked with Docker containers a lot, but really only in my local environment. Right. So it sounds like one of the biggest appeals of Kubernetes can be this really enterprise level deployment of containers. And really when you're looking to do more, like you said, if you have, you know, 30 instances of something or a bunch of load balancers and really mapping out the whole configuration of your application environment that uses containers is really the biggest advantage of Kubernetes, it sounds like. Speaker 4 04:59 Absolutely. And he really hit the nail there, right. So we'll, we'll have worked with containers there. They're great for developers to just, you know, uh, get the code, uh, um, eh, configure up all the dependencies of, of your work, of your libraries that you need, run it on your laptop and that's great. But what happened when you actually start a finding an application, you know, as you said, what are, need a lot more pieces around it. Uh, well, uh, there's a nice little tool that Docker built, which is called a Docker compose. So you can, uh, work with multiple containers, but you're still confined and able to run those containers within one single machine, right? Uh, your laptop typically or maybe a high end server, you want to test some, some performance issues. Um, but what happened when you go to the cloud, when you go to a data center where you have, you know, um, uh, many, many, no nodes meant many VMs, uh, many bare metal machines and, and you need to scatter your, your workload across many of them so you can take advantage, uh, of all the CPS and all the members are there available. Speaker 4 06:00 Well then you need to start installing, you know, things like, you know, a network overlay layers and then <inaudible> then you do you deal, how do you know if those containers are running properly or not, et cetera. And that's what Cuba needs is, does for you. So prepare those nodes a, it creates this overlay network for you. He handles all, literally everything that is done in terms of, you know, networking and a D DNS naming and all those complicated part. And that's why it's very powerful. One other strong characteristic, let me add, just came to my mind is that as you define your application within the cubit nitas platform, that platform, eh, and that definition is totally portable. So if you're working in AWS today and you go this Yammer definition, I know you're looking at me strange, you know? Yeah. More we will, we'll love to hate that. But you know, it works right for now. Um, so that same definition of you, you can bring it on site, on prem, uh, maybe with some bare metal because you want, you know, more performance. And that same definition will run there too with the Cubanitos platform orchestrating everything. And that's very, very powerful. So organization gets portability, they're not locked in to any cloud and they get a, you know, a platform that manages their workload. That's very powerful, Speaker 2 07:13 right? Scaling up some of those benefits of containers like portability, efficiency that you can really do for a whole orchestrated environment there. Um, so kind of taking everything you just sort of said now moving into maybe a little, uh, an example or two, what are some of like, you know, as you've talked with you, their customers of InterSystems systems or just other people that you've seen at conferences or just in your networks. What are some of the coolest, or maybe one or two cool use cases that you've seen where Kubernetes has really helped to take someone's environment or application environment to the next level and really leverage all these things that you're talking about? Speaker 4 07:46 Yeah, I've got a couple of example that they're really spoke to me. Uh, one is, uh, you know, the, uh, a couple of developers that started to work with it and they said, this is great, you know, but I'm a full stack developer and typically I want to test an owner on, you know, on, on a medium size, you know, top of an environment out there, we know six, 12 nodes. So these things is just to go on the cloud. So, so the provision the infrastructure and they say, well, everything is in containers now, so how do I do that? Would they use this thing was for them to just, um, uh, run a cubic meters in the, in the specific cloud. So GKE for example, for, for Google or EKS in AWS. And then all of a sudden they have the possibility to just, to just really run the application, all the components, even components that they are not, uh, develop themselves. Speaker 4 08:32 They were just pulling container, you know, let's say, you know, backhand the new version of the database with the new schema that the organization has just developed. Any has just developed, for example, you know, some, some new business logic and, but he, he was just putting everything together on, on, you know, several machines, several high end machine. It was really testing through properly instead of just running either everything on laptop or trying to configure everything in South manually, just one single manual Jamo definition with everything, um, configured. And it was up and running in a few minutes. So that was, you know, the single developer, they really wanted to, to, uh, to monitor and follow through the, uh, the, the workload, uh, the data coming through where it was going, et cetera, et cetera. And the other one was a, um, um, another customers that are very close to, uh, to go and production are Cubanitos and um, and they were just shocked at the sometimes, you know, they left, you know, the, the S the Cuban data servers up and running. Speaker 4 09:28 And then in the morning they come up and, you know, the system had fallen over, but they didn't know if they didn't go and have a look at the, the, the logs and fallen over the Western problem. You know, one of the easy two instances that died, uh, but the application was up and running. Right. And they were just shocked themselves, you know, know pager note and know that any of those things could Bonitas make sure they know whatever you wanted up and running is up and running all the time. And that's part of his job. You know, there's this controller that keeps checking that everything else as consistent as your, the definition. Speaker 2 09:57 Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And I want to transition to a couple last points about how it relates to InterSystems, Iris. But one thing before we move on, I just want to emphasize too that something you said at the end there, which is kind of that self healing nature of Kubernetes is one of the bit, I think you can't emphasize that enough as far as one of the advantages were that use case. You come in and you didn't even realize something went wrong because it really has this ability to fix itself with some of those fail overs and, and bring up a new node in place of it. So I think it's a good thing to emphasize there. Speaker 4 10:25 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The cell fill in part, it's very powerful. And the other one of course is they, you can auto scale workload automatically so you can set threshold and say, Hey Cubanitos if, you know, if there's two particular nodes, you know, go above, you know, 90% CPU for example, you know, you really need to do something for me. So spin up another, another couple of these nodes that this services and it can do that for you so you can set these rules a part of, of your application. So they, when black Friday come, you just prepare but you don't have to panic. Right, right, right. Speaker 2 10:55 Exactly. Cool. So, uh, so that's really exciting. Moving to kind of the last portion, which is, uh, shifting into our inner systems, Iris users that are listening, right? So whether that's InterSystems, IRS, or even other inner systems, uh, products that are older than Iris and people might move to it. What should people know about the ability and what Ayers is doing to work with Kubernetes? Speaker 4 11:16 As you said earlier on, you know, it really is an orchestrator for four containers. So by the mere fact that we have Iris in a container, um, you know, where we are able, uh, we can run, eh, within a Cubanitos cluster or orchestrate a platform. Um, but there's more to that because things can be complicated to the fine just because I've got this little Yammer, uh, template. Uh, but I might want to put some rules. For example, I want to put some rules, some affinity rule that I want to run my RS instance because it's very important to me as a, as a backend database on that particular node that has 32 cores. So you can put all this type of rules, but then when you get into the specific semantics of InterSystems are as like, I want a, for example, a mirror pair. Well, Cubanitos doesn't know anything about our mirror repair or RSEP communication. And so what we've done is, uh, we built an InterSystems Cubanitos operator that allows you to define, or this particular semantics that we have with our product. You just fine in the Cuban UTIs operator, InterSystems, Kubernetes operator, this, this particular typologies that you want to run and one, it just goes and configure everything for you. And that's very powerful. Yeah. Speaker 2 12:23 Yeah. That's great. Um, so lots of stuff coming. Last, last question here. Uh, just kind of taking a step back in general, as you look forward, you know, with the possibilities with Kubernetes, what excites you the most about kind of the, you know, maybe what's untapped potential or really how you see this going forward into the future? Speaker 4 12:39 Well, I think we're just at the beginning of it, right? If you look at the decade hub, a repo, uh, since 2015 when, um, or was it 2014? Well, anyway, a few years, few years back when, when Google released it, you know, uh, the Cuban Natus, uh, uh, ecosystem had Cubanitos, you know, even get get hub, you know, um, uh, site aware where, uh, more than if they're done with it and a thousand people working on that, it's, it's really exciting. And there are, they, they're divided even into SIG special interest groups. So if you're interested, you know, if people should go there and participate and give opinion for storage, security, all kinds of stuff. I mean we're really talking really high level here, but it really is a full platform. Um, and so I think what we're going to see in the future is a lot more uh, Cubanitos managers, just like some of the work that, uh, AWS and Google and Azure I've done and, and a lot more automation, a lot more monitoring and uh, and at full ecosystem that allows you to really run even in a more automated way than it than it is now. Speaker 4 13:43 So I think we're just the beginning and the portability that offers is just fantastic. So none of us are locked into any specific solution. Exactly. Speaker 2 13:50 Yeah. Very exciting stuff. So Luca, rev is a hello, thank you so much for joining us. Speaker 4 13:54 Thank you. Derek has been a pleasure. Yes, yes sir. Speaker 3 13:56 <inaudible> Speaker 2 14:01 thanks again to Luca for sitting down with us and giving us some really interesting stuff there on Kubernetes. One little side note that might be helpful for those of you looking up content on Kubernetes. This is something that tripped me up a little bit when I was first researching it, is it's often stylized or abbreviated as K eight S in written form. As far as I could tell, that's pretty simply swapping in an eight for the eight letters in the middle of the word Kubernetes between the K and the yes works for me. But if anyone knows more reasoning behind that, leave some comments for us in the developer community to enlighten us on that abbreviation. So hopefully you enjoyed episode two in our conversation with Luca. Remember, make sure to find us on your favorite podcast app and subscribe so that you never miss an episode when it's released. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on data points. Speaker 3 14:45 <inaudible>.