In a recent Medium post, Tinder engineers wrote about their experience migrating the Tinder platform to Kubernetes. It was an in-house effort that took nearly two years, but in the end, Tinder significantly cut its AWS bill, built in-house Kubernetes expertise, and redefined its people structure so that every developer can easily provision infrastructure and, as the engineers emphasized, “have control over how their applications are built and deployed with everything as code.”
Benefits like these that can be achieved by moving to Kubernetes are pretty well known at this point; that’s why we’re seeing such rapid enterprise adoption of containers. But the process that it takes to reap those benefits tends to be less discussed. During their two-year journey to Kubernetes and cloud native, Tinder engineers had to learn—a lot. They had to learn how to use new open source technologies like Envoy for load balancing. They had to learn how to troubleshoot Flannel when hitting network fabric limits. They had to learn how to run a DNS service at scale and respond to DNS timeouts, when an “exhausting tuning effort” didn’t resolve the issue. They had to learn how to design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters at a large scale.
Tinder may have had the in-house resources and the time to devote to learning all of this, but we know that not every organization does. That’s why we launched VMware Essential PKS back in February: to support organizations like Tinder that may want to do it themselves, but need some help figuring out what tools to use and how to best use them—those organizations want to be able to call up Kubernetes experts when something goes wrong.
VMware Essential PKS helps organizations who want expert support and guidance in building a more custom cloud native platform that runs on the latest version of upstream Kubernetes. By running on upstream Kubernetes and providing choice, support, and flexibility with tooling, VMware Essential PKS gives developers the control they need over where and how they build and deploy their applications.
Today we’re excited to announce that VMware Essential PKS is now running on Kubernetes 1.14, which was released less than one month ago. To ensure that we can always safely deliver the latest version of upstream Kubernetes, VMware engineers work to build, test, and validate those open source binaries in a secure environment, so that our customers can install them from a trusted source. And because VMware maintains a mirror of upstream Kubernetes that is regularly synchronized (i.e., never a fork), customers can always switch out our binaries with upstream Kubernetes binaries from GitHub with no loss of functionality.
VMware Essential PKS customers can now start taking advantage of new features in Kubernetes 1.14, like pod readiness gates, Windows containers, and persistent local volumes, while our engineering team gears up to help drive in the Kubernetes 1.15 release process, along with our partners at Pivotal. Stay tuned for more information about what to expect in Kubernetes 1.15!
For more information about VMware Essential PKS, visit our website.
