The challenge
Kubernetes at scale is error-prone and draining for both developer and Ops teams. Even if you’ve nailed the adoption of Kubernetes (read more on this use case here), setting it up in a way that’s productive for both developers and Ops is tricky.
Throwing Kubernetes at developers without the right guardrails and abstractions will significantly slow teams down, while Helm-based approaches to configuration management quickly blow up the surface area Ops teams have to maintain.
Low lead times, high rollout failure rates, ticket ops, and frustrated developers are often the consequence.
How Humanitec products help you nail Kubernetes migration and usage
Streamline application development
Rather than letting developers drown in unstructured Helm charts and manifests, Score provides a unified interface that allows them to describe their workload and its dependencies in an environment-agnostic way. This means developers can use Score as the single config format for all workloads in any environment instead of having to deal with dozens of config files per workload.
Reduce the # of config files required by 95% and drive standardization
Platforms orchestrated with Humanitec’s Platform Orchestrator interpret Score files and automatically create the correct Kubernetes manifests at deployment time. The creation of those final manifests happens by applying the Score file to for example baseline helm-charts.
Operators can use Score to enforce resource limits and ensure that workloads are properly configured. This helps improve the stability and reliability of Kubernetes clusters through standardization. Baseline configurations allow operators to enforce the use of labels, annotations and sidecar containers for agents such as Datadog or Hashicorp Vault. Kubernetes setups managed with Humanitec require 95% less configuration files than Helm- or Kustomize-based equivalents.
"Before using Score and the Orchestrator our delivery speed on Kubernetes was frankly a disaster. Now it’s smooth and 3X faster. "
Markus Schünemann - CTO Lano
Plan beyond Kubernetes from the get go
Humanitec’s rules driven approach to platform orchestration encompasses much more than Kubernetes and compute. Using the same configuration structure, developers are able to request and configure resources inside their cluster, as well as out of cluster, e.g. a managed AWS RDS, Cloudflare DNS entries or a blob storage. The Orchestrator can manage the life-cycle of those non-Kuberentes resources or just consume them, when the life-cycle is managed in a different tool.
Enable Continuous Delivery
In addition to creating configurations dynamically, Humanitec offers a close integrations with your pre-commit tools such as GitLab or Jenkins. This allows you to automate your deployment process, from building your container images to deploying them to your Kubernetes clusters.
Alternative interfaces
Humanitec’s product leave interface choice to the developer on a workload to workload basis. Besides the code-based approach using Score, developers are free to also use the CLI/UI or API to managed Kubernetes and adjacent resources.
