DigitalOcean transitioned from inconsistent deployment tools to using Kubernetes for container orchestration. This improved their ability to deploy new services from hours to minutes. They customized Kubernetes by focusing on stateless services, declarative deployments, and abstracting operational concerns. They created "docc" to simplify Kubernetes usage. It allows describing applications and infrastructure through manifests. Docc helped deploy 50 applications in 6 months and powered an internal hackathon. Lessons included keeping up with Kubernetes' rapid changes and automating cluster management. They will invest in service meshes, network policies, and secure secret storage.

1. digitalocean.com
Betting on Kubernetes:
DigitalOcean’s journey
from adoption to
production
Joonas Bergius
@joonas

3. Where we started
digitalocean.com

4. digitalocean.com

5. digitalocean.com
Deployment
Proliferation of deployment tooling lead to inconsistent
deployment capabilities from service to service
Software deployment via configuration management took
hours and was quite unreliable
Writing the code to deploy new services could take up to
as long as writing the software itself in the worst case
“Total Ownership” model meant that every team needed to
be experts in configuration management as well

6. Orchestration focused on servers rather than services
Mismatch how software was run at various stages of the
lifecycle from developer laptops to production servers
Dependencies became increasingly intertwined making
software upgrades difficult at best, near impossible at worst
Lack of consistent observability across services lead
engineers needing direct access to the servers
digitalocean.com
Operability

7. digitalocean.com
Droplets launched

8. Ability to experiment with new features and services in
matter of hours, not in days or weeks
Improving visibility into the impact a given feature or service
has on the whole
Empower teams to deliver their work from end-to-end
independent of other teams
Capability to quickly scale our services to be able to meet
the ever-increasing customer demand digitalocean.com
Business needs

9. digitalocean.com
Coming up with a solution

10. digitalocean.com
Candidates

11. API-driven for automation
Community engagement
Ease of operability
First-class container support
Feature-compatibility with our existing tooling
Production-grade
digitalocean.com
Evaluation criteria

12. Built from the ground up to be API-first
Extremely engaged community and unparalleled team
Quite involved to deploy and manage, but built with Go
Built on 10 years experience running containers at Google
Rich feature set that surpassed our existing tooling
Ready for prime time
digitalocean.com
How Kubernetes stacked up

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Refining our solution

15. digitalocean.com

16. Curate subset of Kubernetes features:
Smaller feature set makes for a simplified user experience.
Focus on stateless services:
Self-healing, automated remediation of service disruptions.
Declarative deployments:
Each deploy is separate and immutable.
Abstract operational plumbing:
Plugin to existing alerting, logging & metrics infrastructure.
digitalocean.com
Guiding principles

17. digitalocean.com
docc: a tool for deploying
containerized, stateless applications

18. Enables users to describe their application:
number of instances, ports to expose, environment variables
to pass in, resource usage, etc.
Provides a way to configure the infrastructure plumbing:
How to collect metrics, what and where to alert on, how the
service should be made available to the outside.
Drives accountability and provides insight by requiring each
service to have a maintainer listed.
digitalocean.com
docc requires a manifest

19. digitalocean.com
Tectonic Summit application

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Kubernetes resources
Deployment ReplicaSet
Pod
Pod
Pod

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Exposing a Service

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Kubernetes resources:
Exposing a Service
Deployment ReplicaSet
Pod
Pod
Pod
Service
tectonic-summit:8080
Endpoint

23. digitalocean.com

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Kubernetes resources:
Ingress connectivity
Deployment ReplicaSet
Pod
Pod
Pod
Service
tectonic-summit:8080
Endpoint
Ingress
tectonic-summit-2016

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kube-apiserver
kube-apiserver
kube-apiserver
controllers
doccserver
ingress
docc
kubectl
kubelet

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Reflecting on the
past 12 months

27. 50 applications deployed to production in past 6 months
Reduced time-to-deploy from days and weeks to hours
Service coverage across all of our datacenters
Powered 2-day internal hackathon:
a. 154 docc deploys during that time
b. 16 new applications on docc
digitalocean.com
Accomplishments so far

28. Kubernetes moves really fast, find ways to keep up
Get involved in the community early
Invest heavily into automation for managing clusters
Bring in the professionals early to kickstart your journey
Build on top of Kubernetes to make it your own, it was
made for that
This is great company to be in
digitalocean.com
Lessons learned

29. Service mesh using linkerd
Network Policies using Calico
Secure secret storage using HashiCorp Vault
digitalocean.com
Investing in the future

30. digitalocean.com
– Tommy Murphy
“Reduce developer decision fatigue
so they can make decisions that
matter.”

31. digitalocean.comFatih Sneha Dan
Mac Tommy
Team

32. Thank you!