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Solutions based on Kubernetes

High standard
commitment

We have been engaged in the design, implementation, and maintenance of various fault-tolerant IT infrastructures for the past decade, and we have naturally developed our set of standards. By using these standards we are able to provide effective solutions and guaranteed quality, especially when it comes to projects with an arbitrary technological stack and high requirements for availability.

Technological foundation

We implement the infrastructure for continuous development, deploy and maintenance of various applications; the infrastructure is based on the following cornerstone open-source technologies:

  • Kubernetes

    The market-leading open-source container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.

  • Docker

    The industrial standard for containerization of applications.

  • Werf

    Our in-house open-source tool for building Docker images and deploying them to Kubernetes clusters.

  • Prometheus

    The open-source software application used for event monitoring and alerting in cloud-native applications and their infrastructure (with Grafana visualization plugin).

  • GitLab (or alternatives)

    We have implemented a default solution for SCM and CI/CD processes based on GilLab CI. We also support numerous alternatives like Bitbucket, GitHub, Jenkins, drone.io, Circle CI, etc.

  • Ansible

    The open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool.

You can argue a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of various solutions.

We would like to tell our story of why Kubernetes has become the infrastructure foundation that we maintain and why we have had to choose a specific solution for the task.

Why Kubernetes?

Here is the list of essential Kubernetes features in the context of the underlying infrastructure:

  • The leading open-source
    solution

    The leading open-source
    solution
    Kubernetes has become de facto the world's No. 1 container orchestration tool. Kubernetes is open sourced and it has received the support of a huge number of users and companies involved in its comprehensive improvement*. The CNCF is growing a large ecosystem of support projects for Kubernetes. There is no dependence neither on the single company developing Kubernetes, nor on the contractor servicing the specific installations.
    * Did you know that according to GitHub's 2019 statistics, Kubernetes is one of the top 10 Open Source projects by number of contributors? It has more contributors even then the Linux kernel!

  • Well-documented and
    «immutable» infrastructure

    Well-documented and
    «immutable» infrastructure
    A declarative description of the applications infrastructure enables to have configurations that are not changed by hand, and that prevents many problems. Releases are rolled out automatically as a self-contained containers with code and configuration inside. In addition, Kubernetes continuously monitors the current state of the cluster to ensure that it matches the desired state and restarts the components when needed.

  • Provider-agnostic solution

    Provider-agnostic solution
    Providing an additional level of abstraction, Kubernetes gives the opportunity to deploy the infrastructure on any convenient platform: bare metal, IaaS, or cloud (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure) –– even better, it allows to use all of them at once!

  • Native CI/CD support

    Native CI/CD support
    The K8s already includes state-of-the-art techniques that are actively used in the continuous delivery of applications: liveness and readiness probes, sequential and synchronous updates, canary rollouts. With tools like Helm and Werf, infrastructure can easily be integrated with CI systems and other developers' "best friends".

  • Scalable

    Scalable
    Kubernetes automates the horizontal scaling of applications by adding and removing containers depending on the actual load indicators. Vertical auto scaling ensures efficient allocation of resources available in the cluster.

  • Fault-tolerance

    Fault-tolerance
    Kubernetes provides techniques that ensure high availability for both the infrastructure itself and its applications. This is facilitated by continuous health checks of cluster components and recovery, as well as traffic routing and application load balancing to minimize failures.

Our approach

Our highest standards allow us to make cutting-edge technology accessible
to companies of any size, especially for smaller companies.

  • System architecture

    We offer a system architecture with the main emphasis on the integration and utilization of components in the context of business tasks.

    For example, contrary to common perception, the presence of Prometheus per se does not guarantee high-quality monitoring in Kubernetes-based environments which would enable the timely detection of critical issues.

  • Standardization

  • Flexible technologies

  • System architecture

  • Standardization

    By following the standardization path – i.e. by carefully choosing the basic technologies to build a complex infrastructure framework – we can provide a high-level quality service to our customers.

    We solve problems faster and come up with better solutions since we do not have to design and implement them from scratch every time.

    Our goal is to achieve the best result using optimal, time-tested approaches and technologies. When we invest time and money into the development of new solutions in the R&D department, we do it for compelling reasons considering that we have to subsequently test and maintain the developed solution.

  • Flexible technologies

  • System architecture

  • Standardization

  • Flexible technologies

    Our preferred technologies must be flexible enough to cover a diverse technological stack as well as applicable to a wide range of tasks.

    We do not limit the developers in their needs. Applications can be written in any language and adopt any technological innovations.

    We are deeply involved in supporting the broad applications technology stack and it combines well with the underlying infrastructure.

Your benefits

These technologies along with the well-established best practices provide excellent footing for the infrastructure which boasts the following notable features:

  • Flexible framework

    We believe in the IaC (Infrastructure as code) approach and describe the infrastructure through machine-readable definition files. Thus we possess all the necessary information that allows us to deploy infrastructure components rapidly and streamline their modification by unification. Kubernetes is an excellent choice for centralized control of applications built with various stacks. You can get additional information about its advantages (reliability, scalability, cloud provider independence, etc.) in the section “Why Kubernetes?”.

  • CI/CD

    Besides having a Kubernetes cluster, we prepare ecosystem critical for the smooth development process: Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery. We formalize and integrate all the necessary pipelines with the production, staging, testing and development environments. We automate all the necessary tasks to build applications into Docker images, one click deploy, tests run…

  • Continuous operation

    Deploying your application into production usually is not the end of the story. Now it is live and you have to think about running it there. We take care of continuous operation, collection of logs and comprehensive statistics, competent monitoring and problem prevention, backups, scaling issues. To solve all the issues in a Kuberneres-native-way we have created certain open-source tools, such as shell-operator, addon-operator, loghouse, adn werf.

  • Open-source ecosystem

    All the underlying basic infrastructure is built on open-source technologies. Many of them have become industry leaders in the cloud native world (Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus) and we participate in their further development. Other technologies which we use daily were incepted first at Flant — and we open-source them and evangelize in the professional community along with providing documentation and advise. Our most prominent project is Werf and it is very well received by engineers beyond Flant — it has more than 1000 stars on GitHub. We plan to develop it further and popularize with the global DevOps community. We specifically prefer using open-source tools and solutions in the client’s infrastructure to exclude any chance of proprietary lock-in on our service.

  • Flexibility

    We have extensive experience in running various workloads in a Kubernetes cluster: apps written in all popular programming languages, classical relational DBMS as well as NoSQL databases, storages like Ceph or Minio, caches, proxies, and many other components needed for modern applications. And we can adapt and fine tune your infrastructure to your requirements. Kubernetes allows us to run almost anything in the cluster and achieve the same best result for very different architectures and solutions.

Try our DevOps-as-a-Service

The smooth operation of the production cluster.

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