Challenge
Solution
After evaluating a number of orchestration solutions, the Nav team decided to adopt
Impact
The four-person team got Kubernetes up and running in six months, and the full migration of Nav's 25 microservices was completed in another six months. The results have been impressive: Resource utilization, which led the company on this path in the first place, has increased from 1% to 40%. Launching a new service used to take two developers two weeks; now it takes only one developer less than 10 minutes. Deployments have increased 5x. And the company is saving 50% in infrastructure costs.
A couple of years ago, Nav recognized an obstacle in its own path to success. The business was growing rapidly, and "our cloud environments were getting very large, and our usage of those environments was extremely low, like under 1%," says Jeppson. "Most of the problem was around the ability to scale. We were just throwing money at it. 'Let's just spin up more servers. Let's just do more things in order to handle an increased load.' And with us being a startup, that could lead to our demise. We don't have the money to burn on that kind of stuff."
Plus, every new service had to go through 10 different people, taking an unacceptably long two weeks to launch. "All of the patch management and the server management was done very manually, and so we all had to watch it and maintain it really well," adds Jeppson. "It was just a very troublesome system."
Jeppson had worked with containers at his previous job, and pitched that technology to Nav's management as a solution to these problems. He got the green light in early 2017. "We wanted our usage of cloud environments to be more tightly coupled with what we actually needed, so we started looking at containerization and orchestration to help us be able to run workloads that were distinct from one another but could share a similar resource pool," he says.
After evaluating a number of orchestration solutions, the company decided to adopt
Jeppson's four-person Engineering Services team got Kubernetes up and running in six months (they decided to use
A crucial part of the process involved educating Nav's 50 engineers and being transparent regarding the new workflow as well as the roadmap for the migration. Jeppson did regular presentations along the way, and a week of four-hours-a-day labs for the entire staff of engineers. He then created a repository in
Kubernetes has also helped Nav with its compliance needs. Before, "we had to map one application to one server, mostly due to different compliance regulations around data," Jeppson says. "With the Kubernetes API, we could add in network policies and segregate that data and restrict it if needed." The company segregates its cluster into an unrestricted zone and a restricted zone, which has its own set of nodes where data protection happens. The company also uses the
With Kubernetes in place, the Nav team also started improving the system's metrics and logging by adopting
Next up for Nav in the coming year: looking at tracing, storage, and service mesh. They're currently evaluating
Conversations about new products used to be bogged down by the fact they'd have to wait six months to get an environment set up with isolation and then figure out how to handle spikes of traffic. "But now it's just nothing to us," says Jeppson. "We're talking four to 10 times the amount of traffic that we handle now, and it's just like, 'Oh, yeah. We're good. Kubernetes handles this for us.'"