Helping the helpers: Managed Kubernetes relieves some of the burden for software developers in the SaaS era

Advertorial Much has been made about how the SaaS community is making workloads more manageable, resource-efficient, cost-effective and lucrative for businesses. But what of those who provide such a valuable managed proposition?

As their workloads rise to new and extreme levels, how can software developers ensure they remain just as efficient and in-control, as those they serve? Kubernetes as a solution has gone some way to offsetting this challenge for many. A managed Kubernetes proposition can serve as an even more robust and sustainable solution moving forward.

To understand the scale of the issue at hand, it’s important to note that the SaaS services market was estimated to be worth $141 billion by this year. This volume alone highlights the level of strain being placed on developers. And then there’s the rate of the market’s growth. 73% of companies switched to SaaS solutions last year. Three-quarters, placing their applications, their infrastructures, their solutions and their data in the hands of outsourced subscription services.

Such a deluge of requirements and expectation, amid a backdrop of more expectant, impatient and digitally-savvy end customers, has made the role of SaaS providers extremely challenging. And, in such a context, Kubernetes is a game changer.

As a solution, it makes applications immeasurably easier to handle. But more than that, it facilitates the exact level of scalability that software developers crave at this moment. As their workloads grow, a cloud-based IT infrastructure consisting of Kubernetes-orchestrated containers can expand accordingly.

The resultant, automated, setup is the perfect solution to the perfect storm for a sector in demand.

Scaling in tandem with clients

At present, Kubernetes is used by 88% of IT engineers, DevOps and information security specialists, emphasising how quickly the solution has become pivotal to this community. You don't have to delve too deep into the solution's benefits to realise why.

Essentially, it represents the opportunity to expend less capacity while continuously, safely and quickly testing products and updates.

For a contingent that has been forced to scale so quickly, off the back of a pandemic period which has catalysed businesses’ digital transformation efforts, developers needed a solution that could help them scale resources without having to stop or disrupt their service. Kubernetes allows for unlimited, managed clusters through containerisation. Not only does this help the outsourced developer, but it also serves as an attractive market differentiator to their prospective clients.

We've already seen  high profile heavyweights such as Spotify  move away from their homegrown container orchestration systems in favour "adopting something that is supported by a much bigger community."

But the plethora of digital businesses that don’t have the same developer resources as Spotify, knowing that their SaaS providers can and will scale in tandem with their own growth presents a significant boon.

Additional advantages from SaaS’ affiliation with Kubernetes is the ability to update all applications within a network simultaneously, and automatically; again relieving strain for developers themselves. This can lead to an increased speed of mass update deployments by 15 times.

Automation is further seen in the form of damage recovery without performance drops, and the culmination is improved cost-effectiveness as well as more seamless application development and data protection.

In fact, another great case study to look at is that of Adform. The company achieved a sixfold quicker time to market, five times reduced maintenance costs and almost trebled resource efficiency, simply by migrating its SaaS offering to the cloud and adopting Managed Kubernetes.

Arming developers as the market expands

And it is here, down the ‘Managed Kubernetes’ aisle that additional value can be found for software developers.

In the same way they alleviate additional strain for their clients, a solution such as Managed Kubernetes by G-Core Labs enables developers to thrive across their entire workload portfolio, by making it manageable, regardless of scale.

The ability to containerise such an exponentially expanding workload in a fully automated way is invaluable. To assure updates and seamless testing without the fear of downtime, failures, or additional expenditure is a differentiator to software developers; but also a huge selling point to those putting faith in that SaaS offering. Equally important however is the hardware to support such scalability. That's why G-Core Labs' cloud services and infrastructure rely on the very latest Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Gen 3 processors.

Ultimately, a market segment that has been placed at the heart of so many organisations' change strategies, now has the armoury to meet expectations.

One final example, to this end, cites Ant Financial, a Chinese finance company existing within the Alipay ecosystem, which processes more than 250,000 transactions per second at peak times, across 900 million users. The adoption of a managed Kubernetes solution not only simplifies the management of such a vast volume of data, but – most pivotally – it secures and stores that sensitive information thanks to the automatic encryption of connections during information transfers.

Notions of scalability, manageability, security and stability underpin the very worth of SaaS in the current business climate. Kubernetes has quickly become the solution to ensure these values shine through. A managed Kubernetes solution makes sure they will continue to do so, even as this market continues to expand.

Sponsored by G-Core Labs