The challenge
K8s at scale is error-prone and draining for both developer and Ops teams. Even if you’ve nailed the adoption of K8s (read more on this use case here), setting it up in a way that’s productive for both developers and Ops is tricky.
Throwing K8s at developers without the right guardrails and abstractions will significantly slow teams down, while Helm-based approaches to config 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
Humanitec‘s Platform Orchestrator interprets Score files and automatically creates the correct K8s manifests at deployment time. The creation of those final manifests happens by applying the Score file to baseline Helm charts pre-defined by the platform team.s.
Ops teams can use Score to enforce resource limits and ensure workloads are properly configured. This helps improve the stability and reliability of K8s clusters through standardization. Baseline configs allow Ops to enforce the use of labels, annotations, and sidecar containers for agents such as Datadog or Hashicorp Vault. K8s setups managed with Humanitec require 95% less config 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 K8s and compute. Using the same config structure, developers are able to request and configure resources inside and outside their cluster, e.g. a managed AWS RDS, Cloudflare DNS entries, or a blob storage. The Platform Orchestrator can manage the lifecycle of those non-K8s resources or just consume them when the lifecycle is managed in a different tool.
Enable Continuous Delivery
In addition to creating configs dynamically, Humanitec offers 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 K8s clusters.
Alternative interfaces
Humanitec’s product leaves 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 manage K8s and adjacent resources.
