- They had considered other options like Google’s App Engine (which they were already using for one service) and Amazon’s
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), while experimenting with running one small service that wasn’t accessible to the Internet in Kubernetes. "When it became clear that Google Container Engine was going to have a lot of support from Google and be a fully-managed Kubernetes platform, it seemed very obvious to us that was the way to go," says Eynon-Lynch. "We didn’t really consider Terraform and the other competitors because the abstractions offered by Kubernetes just jumped off the page to us."
+ They had considered other options like Google’s App Engine (which they were already using for one service) and Amazon’s
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), while experimenting with running one small service that wasn’t accessible to the Internet in Kubernetes. "When it became clear that Google Kubernetes Engine was going to have a lot of support from Google and be a fully-managed Kubernetes platform, it seemed very obvious to us that was the way to go," says Eynon-Lynch. "We didn’t really consider Terraform and the other competitors because the abstractions offered by Kubernetes just jumped off the page to us."
Once the team started porting its Heroku apps into Kubernetes, which was "super easy," he says, the impact was immediate. "Before, to make a new version of the app meant going to Heroku and reconfiguring 10 new services, so basically no one was willing to do it, and we never staged things," he says. "Now we can deploy our exact same configuration in lots of different clusters in 30 seconds. We have a full set up that’s always running, and then any of our developers or designers can stage new versions with one command, including their recent changes. We stage all the time now, and everyone stopped talking about how cool it is because it’s become invisible how great it is."
- Along with Kubernetes came Prometheus. "Until pretty recently we didn’t have any kind of visibility into aggregate server metrics or performance," says Eynon-Lynch. The team had tried to use GKE’s
Stackdriver monitoring, but had problems making it work, and considered
New Relic. When they started looking at Prometheus in the fall of 2016, "the fit between the abstractions in Prometheus and the way we think about how our system works, was so clear and obvious," he says.
+ Along with Kubernetes came Prometheus. "Until pretty recently we didn’t have any kind of visibility into aggregate server metrics or performance," says Eynon-Lynch. The team had tried to use Google Kubernetes Engine’s
Stackdriver monitoring, but had problems making it work, and considered
New Relic. When they started looking at Prometheus in the fall of 2016, "the fit between the abstractions in Prometheus and the way we think about how our system works, was so clear and obvious," he says.
The integration with Kubernetes made set-up easy. Once Helm installed Prometheus, "We started getting a graph of the health of all our Kubernetes nodes and pods immediately. I think we were pretty hooked at that point," Eynon-Lynch says. "Then we got our own custom instrumentation working in 15 minutes, and had an actively updated count of requests that we could do, rate on and get a sense of how many users are connected at a given point. And then it was another hour before we had alarms automatically showing up in our Slack channel. All that was in one afternoon. And it was an afternoon of gasping with delight, basically!"