The Kubernetes Learning Curve with Edgaras Apsega

Some of the highlights of the show include

• Why Adform decided to move to a cloud native architecture and Kubernetes specifically 
• Who was the driving force behind the move to Kubernetes?
• Was the switch purely an engineering decision or did it involve people outside of engineering?
• Positive and less positive surprises that come with switching to cloud native 
• Organizational and technical problems Edgaras has faced
• What’s next for Adform on their cloud journey

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apsega/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/Apsega

Transcript
Announcer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native Podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I’m Emily Omier, your host. And I’m here today with Edgaras Apsega, lead IT systems engineer at AdForm. Edgaras, what I’d like to do is just start out with you introducing yourself.

Edgaras: I’m Edgaras. I’m working in the Adform. For anyone that doesn't know, Adform is one of the leading advertising technology companies in the world, and provides the software used by buyers and sellers to automate digital advertising. And, probably one of the most interesting parts of our solution stack is demand-side platform that has real-time bidding. And, what it means is that when that page is loading for some kind of internet users, behind the curtain, there's actually a bidding process that takes place for the placeholders to show ads. So, basically, you're doing low latency stuff. And, in Adform, I'm a lead systems engineer for the cloud services team. Our team consists of eight people, and we are providing private cloud storage, load balancing, CDN, service discovery and Kubernetes platforms for our developers that are in [00:01:36 unintelligible] production services.  So, to better understand the scale that our team is working on, first of all, you can see that we are not using public cloud and we have our own private cloud that has six regions, more than 1500 physical servers, and there are more than 4000 [00:01:55 unintelligible]. And, for Kubernetes, we have seven clusters, more than 50 physical machines and around 300 constantly running [00:02:05 pods].  So, we can say that we prefer bigger clusters with bigger resources sharing pools. And you asked, how do I spend my daily work, right?

Emily: Yeah. So, when you get into the office or—right now you're not going into the office—get into your table or your [laughs] home office, what are the first couple things that you do, or…

Edgaras: Yeah, so, when I arrive at work, or, like, at these times, just get off the showers straight into work desk, [laughs] actually, I'm most productive in the mornings and evenings. So, in the mornings, when I go to my work desk, I try to do as much as I can. My sprint plan tasks, and then I scroll through the Slacks, emails, and the tickets assigned to me because we have a development team in another region. So, instantly in the mornings, we have some kinds of support tasks that we need to do.

Emily: Let's go ahead and talk about what this is all about, the business of cloud native, and tell me a little bit about why Adform decided to move to a cloud native architecture. Why did you decide to use Kubernetes, for example?

Edgaras: I'd say, actually, there were two parts. At first, we moved from traditional and, let's say, old-fashioned monitoring solutions to Prometheus, and its integration with service discovery solved lots of operational time for constantly managing and configuring monitoring and alerting for our, quite often, changing infrastructure. And the second part is the adoption of Kubernetes and all of the together coming parts like continuous integration and delivery. So, why we moved to this kind of architecture? It was because the biggest pain points for developers were to maintain actually their virtual machines. And rolling out new software releases in an old-fashioned way, took just lots of time for new software releases to reach production. So, we were looking at the new solutions that were available in the market, and Kubernetes was actually one of them. So, after successful proof of concept, we have selected it as our main application scheduler and orchestration tool.

Emily: What would you say was, like, the business value that you were hoping to get out of Kubernetes, out have the ability to release software faster, for example?

Edgaras: Yeah.  So, actually, we wanted to remove the operational time from our developers so that they could spend more time coding without taking care of all of the infrastructure surrounding parts, like the application operating system management, [00:04:58 unintelligible] monitoring, alerting, logging, and so on. So, basically what, I'm saying is that the business value was for the developers to be able to ship features faster, and have a more stable platform that scales application [00:05:15 unintelligible] as well. So, in addition to that, we have a big research department, and the research department always wanted us to have a dynamic environment where they could just launch an applications around some research models, and then shut it down.  So, I believe that was the business value.

Emily: Who in the organization do you think was motivating, or driving the move to Kubernetes?

Edgaras: I'd say, actually, it was more like the operation engineers, because the developers ended taking care of their environment virtual machines. They don't know much about it, but they still have to look after it, and constantly asking us for help. And we wanted to have this operational stuff only in our hands and for the developers to run only the code.  So, I believe, yeah.

Emily: To what extent was the move to Kubernetes, or to cloud native in general, just purely an engineering decision? Or did it involve other people outside of engineering?

Edgaras: Well, it wasn't only the engineering decision, because we had to take it to the upper levels, just to show this new cloud native, the modern way of developing and running applications. So, the upper management level had to invest time for us to move to microservices oriented architecture and so on. So, basically, we had to show that with a little bit of time investment we can gain lots of benefits, like faster code deploys. So, we are taking the operational work from developers, and developers, when they're releasing their applications, they have full stack monitoring, logging, and they don't need to do any of the operational tasks.

Emily: How difficult was it to have this conversation? Do you feel like the upper management, did they understand the value?

Edgaras: Yeah, it was kind of hard, because nobody wants to invest time to write the code. And, as we are a software company, we always need to write new features. But, once we showed a good example, when investing not so much time, we have those kinds of benefits, then it was quite easy to change the mindset of upper management.

Emily: And, how important do you think this was for Adform?

Edgaras: I think it was very im...