Challenge
The world's largest online-only grocery retailer,
The team decided to migrate from fleet to
With Kubernetes, "the speed from idea to implementation to deployment is amazing," says Bryant. "I've seen features go from development to production inside of a week now. In the old world, a new application deployment could easily take over a month." And because there are no longer restrictive deployment windows in the warehouses, the rate of deployments has gone from as few as two per week to dozens per week. Ocado has also achieved cost savings because Kubernetes gives the team the ability to have more fine-grained resource allocation. Says DevOps Team Leader Kevin McCormack: "We have more confidence in the resource allocation/separation features of Kubernetes, so we have been able to migrate from around 10 fleet clusters to one Kubernetes cluster." The team also uses
The company began developing its Ocado Smart Platform to manage its own operations, from websites to warehouses, and is now licensing the technology to other grocery chains around the world, such as
Bryant had already been using Kubernetes with
In the summer of 2016, the team began migrating from fleet to
The first app on Kubernetes, a business-critical service in the warehouses, went into production a year later. Once that app was running smoothly, a mass migration continued into 2018. Hundreds of Ocado engineers working on the Smart Platform are now deploying on Kubernetes, and the platform is live in Ocado's warehouses, managing tens of thousands of orders a week. At full capacity, Ocado's latest warehouse in Erith, southeast London, will deliver more than 200,000 orders per week, making it the world's largest facility for online grocery. There are about 150 microservices now running on Kubernetes, with multiple instances of many of them. "We're not just deploying all these microservices at once. We're deploying them all for one warehouse, and then they're all being deployed again for the next warehouse, and again and again," says Bryant. The move to Kubernetes was eye-opening for many people at Ocado Technology. "In the early days of putting the platform into our test infrastructure, the technical architect asked what network performance was like on
Indeed, the impact has been profound. "Prior to containerization, we had quite restrictive deployment windows in our warehouses," says Bryant. "Moving to microservices, we've been able to deploy much more frequently. We've been able to move towards continuous delivery in a number of areas. In our older warehouse, new application deployments involve talking to a bunch of different teams for different levels of the stack: from VM provisioning, to storage, to load balancers, and so on. The unified API of Kubernetes means this is all in one place, and it's one flow for approval and rollout. I've seen features go from development to production inside of a week now. In the old world, a new application deployment could easily take over a month." The rate of deployment has gone from as few as two per week to dozens per week. "With Kubernetes, some of our development teams have been able to deploy their application to production on the new platform without us noticing," says Bryant, "which means they're faster at doing what they need to do and we have less work." Ocado has also achieved cost savings because Kubernetes gives the team the ability to have more fine-grained resource allocation. "That lets us shrink quite a lot of our deployments from being per-core VM deployments to having fractions of the core," says Bryant. Adds McCormack: "We have more confidence in the resource allocation/separation features of Kubernetes, so we have been able to migrate from around 10 fleet clusters to one Kubernetes cluster. This means we use our hardware better since if we have to always have two nodes of excess capacity available in case of node failures then we only need two extra instead of 20." The team also uses
One of the broader benefits of cloud native, says Bryant, is the unified API. "We have one method of doing our deployments that covers the wide range of things we need to do, and we can extend the API," he says. In addition to using Prometheus Operator, the Ocado team has started writing its own operators, some of which have been
Ocado's own technology, in the form of its Smart Platform, will soon be used
Solution
Impact