Kubernetes Case Study : Spotify
Spotify: An early adopter of Containers, Spotify is Migrating from Homegrown Orchestration to Kubernetes.
About Spotify
Company : Spotify
Location : Global
Industry type : Entertainment
Challenges faced by Spotify
Spotify was an early adopter of Microservices and Docker, it had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. By late 2017, it became clear that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,” they say.
Solution
They found Kubernetes as an amazing community that has grown up, then they decided to be a part of it. Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Kubernetes helps them to reduce the costs and added velocity. Also at that time Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and later it was adopted as a replace to Helios.
The Software Engineer of Spotify, named DAVE ZOLOTUSKY says that: —
“The community has been extremely helpful in getting us to work through all the technology much faster and much easier. And it’s helped us validate all the things we’re doing."
Impact
The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for the migration. They were able to use a lot of the Kubernetes APIs and extensibility features of Kubernetes to support and interface with our legacy infrastructure, so the integration was straightforward and easy.
Migration started late that year and has accelerated in 2019. Their focus was really on stateless services. A small percentage of Spotify’s fleet, containing over 150 services, has been migrated to Kubernetes so far.
“They’ve heard from their customers that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify”.
The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes over 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling, says Wen. Earlier teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes. In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average.
Conclusion by Reliability Engineer of Spotify
“It’s been surprisingly easy to get in touch with anybody we wanted to, to get expertise on any of the things we’re working with. And it’s helped us validate all the things we’re doing.”
The community has been extremely helpful in getting them to work through all the technology much faster and much easier.
Just like Spotify, there are many such use cases of Kubernetes that helped many people to establish and easy maintenance of their Services.
Also as soon as this community get tried by many companies/startups, the community got famous and popular and adopted everyone in the World.
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