Kubernetes has become an important part of the IT world, and is still growing. At this stage, Kubernetes can help enterprises with microservices training and accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises. While Kubernetes is such an impressive container orchestration tool, it is still very complex. To run and maintain Kubernetes clusters, you need extensive container domain experience. Furthermore, setting up a cluster and deploying it takes a lot of time and effort, even if you already have the experience. Once you have successfully set up the Kubernetes environment, you need to monitor and manage it.

For some organizations, the costs and risks involved in maintaining a Kubernetes ecosystem outweigh the benefits of implementing it. However, building Kubernetes internally, while cheap, is tricky and complex. A small error in the implementation of Kubernetes can be discovered in a production environment with disastrous consequences. Redeployment can result in delayed delivery. This is a major concern for some organizations that have delayed the adoption of Kubernetes. In this context, management Kubernetes service came into being.

Managing Kubernetes services not only ensures better delivery quality, but also ensures greater flexibility, high availability, security, and efficiency in your Kubernetes environment. Developers need the Kubernetes platform to be highly available, and internal platforms need the entire team to ensure the availability and security of the Kubernetes platform. However, setting up monitoring services on the Kubernetes platform is more daunting than deploying the platform itself. This means that operations is wasting a lot more time on developers before they can help them solve problems. For many organizations, the need is not just to build a usable Kubernetes platform, but also to build CI/CD pipeline and Jenkins.

These demands burden IT teams, who must set up, implement, and manage multiple different services. Managing the Kubernetes service helps IT teams address these concerns by managing and maintaining the Kubernetes environment and ensuring the health of the cluster by monitoring multiple metrics of the cluster on a unified dashboard.

So what are the problems that managing Kubernetes services should solve?

  • Managing The Kubernetes service solution requires efficient management and operation tasks of the control panel, the ability to quickly deploy the Kubernetes panel, and allowing customers to plug into various environments easily.

  • In addition, the ideal management Kubernetes service solution needs to meet the need to update the Kubernetes version across all Kubernetes environments without any problems.

  • Managing the Kubernetes service requires setting up an effective cluster monitoring mechanism, providing a real-time visual view of cluster health, and attempting to fix cluster problems on their own. Management Kubernetes service should send timely alerts for problems that customers need to be aware of.

List of the top five managed Kubernetes services

Rancher

Although Rancher has its own container choreography platform, it also provides an open source management Kubernetes service. Rancher allows you to manage multiple clusters from a single interface. Rancher’s container-based installer, Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE), supports cloud and local deployment. More critically, Rancher has an intuitive and minimalist experience that lets you get to work without any deep knowledge of Kubernetes.

Rancher can deploy Prometheus and Grafana out of the box to visualize metrics for clusters and workloads. Rancher, on the other hand, makes it easy to deploy workloads for new Kubernetes users, while still preserving all traditional access channels for advanced users. Rancher’s simple management architecture provides users with more secure systems, more efficient teams, and the flexibility for businesses to move to market.

Rancher is intended to be a lock-in Kubernetes management platform that allows users to import existing clusters built using managed Kubernetes services. Rancher is the industry’s first and only platform that manages all of the Kubernetes clusters on all clouds, all distributions, giving users the freedom to choose their infrastructure.

In particular, Rancher is the industry’s only Kubernetes management platform that has partnered with all of the world’s leading cloud providers to support its hosted Kubernetes cluster. In China, Rancher has the comprehensive support of mainstream leading public cloud including Ali Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Baidu Intelligent cloud, Ping An cloud, users can directly create and manage public cloud hosted Kubernetes service on the Rancher platform, and realize the unified management of multiple public cloud hosted Kubernetes service.

Platform9

Platform9’s management Kubernetes service integrates multiple infrastructures on the cloud and locally. Platform9’s upstream master servers can be deployed to a variety of cloud vendors and can be managed through a unified interface. Platform9 supports Google Cloud, bare metal, Azure, AWS, vSphere, and Nutanix AHV. In addition, Platform9 provides a serverless framework for writing short-term functions that trigger events in Kubernetes clusters.

This is automated on the second day of managing Kubernetes services using Platform9, and you can upgrade with one click without interrupting the server. Platform9 also provides instant security patches for all Kubernetes environments.

On the cluster monitoring side, Platform9 continuously monitors all clusters remotely and automatically fixes all issues, and a prepaged dashboard helps you easily monitor all applications and clusters.

With Platform, you can deploy and integrate your content of choice in five minutes. It is not difficult to plug in existing clusters. Once you connect to the cluster, Platform9 will automatically discover your infrastructure and start managing it. Finally, Platform takes care of cluster monitoring whether your cluster is down or down.

GiantSwarm

Just like Platform9, GiantSwarm provides a complete management Kubernetes service based on the standard Kubernetes API. Since it is integrated based on the Kubernetes API, GiantSwarm can run Kubernetes clusters located anywhere. GiantSwarm provides instant management for your Kubernetes environment to help you deliver faster. It wants developers to focus on innovation rather than management. GiantSwarm also helps you deploy new updates several times a day.

Similar to Platform9, GiantSwarm lets you run workloads in several different environments. GiantSwarm also helps you ensure high uptime through continuous upgrades and efficient troubleshooting. It provides instant security patches to ensure your cluster security is airtight. GiantSwarm has high-profile clients such as Adidas, Vodafone and Valliant. The API driver platform allows you to easily create and extend clusters.

Pivotal

Built for next-day operations, Pivotal Container Service (PKS) allows you to deploy and run workloads on both private and public clouds. PKS also closely monitors your cluster and performs regular health checks.

With PKS, you can use network segmentation to isolate different containers in a single cluster. Whenever PKS encounters a new service, it quickly applies patches to ensure application and cluster security. You can also manage your virtual network programmatically to ensure overall security.

Kublr

Kublr is a management Kubernetes service that simplifies deployment in different environments. You can deploy the cluster through the Kublr UI or API. Every time a cluster is deployed, Kublr automatically connects it to a log collection and monitoring system.

Kublr collects metrics through Prometheus and Elasticsearch, and uses Grafana or Kibana to visualize cluster metrics. Kublr’s alarm manager connects to email, Slack, and Pagerduty to ensure you don’t miss alerts.

In addition, Kublr ensures cluster portability, with lightweight agents installed on each cluster performing installation and configuration and continuously monitoring health. Kublr also provides self-healing and self-marshalling capabilities.

Managing the Kubernetes service: Get the organization to press the “easy” button

As more and more organizations adopt Kubernetes, the tool ecosystem around Kubernetes is bound to continue to grow strongly. Using Kubernetes can be complicated for a beginner developer. At the same time, the cost of creating and deploying a cluster can become prohibitively expensive without the right knowledge. Kubernetes will slow down the IT development of the organization, thus losing the true meaning of Kubernetes.

Therefore, organizations need to easily manage all the activities of the growing Kubernetes cluster by managing the Kubernetes service. Kubernetes clusters are not only difficult to build and deploy, but also difficult to run and manage. The above solution will help you upgrade the Kubernetes version and apply security patches. On the other hand, with excellent cluster monitoring capabilities, you can track cluster performance. In addition, these tools provide ongoing health checks to ensure that your cluster is scalable and highly available.

These solutions are just a few of the many services available on the market that can help you take full advantage of Kubernetes without too much effort. Although these tools do the same job, they are still evolving in their own right, and the way they adapt to Kubernetes will keep them on top of the trend.