Kubernetes Fleet Management with Plural for Financial Services
Financial service institutions face constant pressure to deliver new services rapidly and at scale. At the same time, financial services is a highly regulated industry, requiring higher levels of access security controls, enforced isolation boundaries, and auditing of all Kubectl actions due to PCI regulatory requirements.
Fintech companies have aggressive cloud infrastructure goals with strict deadlines, and the overhead of maintaining Kubernetes fleets adds up when you scale. For starters, finding talented Kubernetes engineers is difficult and quite costly, and smaller DevOps teams are devoting high levels of attention to managing Kubernetes details vs. focusing on higher-value work.
It is also quite difficult and time-consuming to upgrade Kubernetes versions since you don’t know which compatibility problems will arise until they pop up. Ultimately, it slows down the pace you can release software and cuts into your bottom line.
And, to top it all off, gaining a single, unified view of all your applications and clusters spanning across various cloud providers, on-prem, and edge environments increases in complexity as you scale upwards.
As organizations expand their Kubernetes cluster presence, establishing a standardized approach to Kubernetes management across different teams is necessary. This means adopting a robust Kubernetes fleet management platform, especially as stringent industry regulations come into play.
In this article, we will cover problems engineering teams face in financial services industry, and how we plan to solve them at Plural.
How does Plural address challenges faced by engineers in financial services organizations?
After talking with hundreds of engineering leaders in the financial services industry, we can break down the problems engineering teams face into five parts.
Challenges in Financial Services | How does Plural solve that challenge? |
Manually provisioning and managing clusters across various environments as you scale is error-prone and time-consuming. Different product lines live in different environments for security/regulation purposes. | Plural creates standardization across your fleet of clusters and workloads. Plural automates the provisioning and lifecycle of every Kubernetes cluster across any cloud, on-prem, and edge environment with guardrails included. |
Smaller DevOps teams need help to meet the resource needs of new business applications thus leading to longer lead times which slows down company growth. | Plural simplifies the process for developers to deploy applications on Kubernetes, reducing barriers to entry. With Plural, organizations can achieve faster time-to-value by instantly accessing production-ready infrastructure. It guarantees consistent and reliable Kubernetes operations, regardless of scale, ensuring a seamless experience throughout. |
Controlling access to Kubernetes resources and assuring consistent governance across Kubernetes clusters as you scale your cluster footprint is challenging from a security and regulation standpoint. | Plural creates governance standardizations across all teams utilizing Kubernetes. Plural provides developers with self-service access to Kubernetes resources to anyone who needs it for development or testing. |
Gaining visibility into clusters and applications across various cloud providers, and on-prem locations is challenging and there is no center point of command to manage this at scale. When running an outdated version of the Kubernetes API, you’re putting your application at risk of substantial downtime. | Single pane of glass view for your infrastructure and modern applications across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments. Plural does a pre-upgrade version compatibility check for Kubernetes and add-ons. Our platform also automatically scans your repositories for deprecated Kubernetes APIs. |
Deploying software between pipelines (Dev, test-1,test-2, pre-prod, prod) is challenging, and ensuring consistency between environments is not scalable. | Plural allows you to easily deploy services from Git or Helm sources. With Gated promotions, canary, and blue/green deployments, our pull-based architecture is flexible, requires no custom scripting, and allows you to deploy at an infinite scale. |
Plural for Kubernetes Fleet Management
Building and maintaining scalable and reliable infrastructure shouldn’t slow down innovation. Application team's priorities shouldn’t be focused on setting up and maintaining their environments. Instead, they should be focusing on building applications and meeting the growing needs of their customers.
Currently, the barrier to entry to working with Kubernetes is high and slows down fast-moving teams' adoption of Kubernetes at scale. Plural allows any engineer to easily manage their Kubernetes ecosystem anywhere - securely and at scale - in a single pane of glass regardless of expertise.
Plural is a self-hosted Kubernetes fleet management platform that provides a single pane of glass, removing the complexity of managing Kubernetes clusters at scale. With Plural, engineering teams can gain visibility, automation, governance, and security capabilities in an easily adaptable platform to manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters across public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and GCP as well as on-prem and remote/edge locations.
With Plural, engineering teams can do the following:
- Plural will give your engineering organization multi-cluster visibility into your entire cluster fleet across various environments. With Plural, your engineers get self-service access to Kubernetes clusters and automated cluster lifecycle management using proven templates with guardrails included.
- Manage Kubernetes clusters and add-on upgrades in a single, intuitive interface and confidently know that upgrading a Kubernetes version won’t break anything downstream. Plural will help you with upgrading the control plane, Kubernetes add-ons, and your services. With Plural, you’ll be made aware if you have a compatible version of your add-ons for the version of Kubernetes you are upgrading.
- Share the responsibility of managing Kubernetes tasks with a broader subset of your engineers, including those without prior Kubernetes experience. Top-tier Kubernetes talent is costly and hard to attain. Managing infrastructure shouldn’t be challenging and pricey, and your most skilled engineers should focus on building out awesome product features to drive business value. With Plural, your team can create standard workflows to automate time-tedious and challenging tasks of configuring, and provisioning clusters across fleets in one patch rather than following the manual, error-prone process today that makes managing Kubernetes clusters challenging.
To learn more about Plural’s self-hosted fleet Kubernetes fleet management platform sign up for a custom product demo to learn more.