Author: Melanie Achard, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Solarwinds
Bio: Melanie Achard’s career in technology started out as favor to a friend when she wrote her first software program on a Morrow Micro System. Her curiosity piqued, she accepted a software development position at a startup and was instantly hooked. Since then, she has worked in software engineering, product management, and product marketing at a variety of companies—from small, three-person startups to large Fortune 500 organizations—all with a focus on solving problems that people care about. With 30 years of experience across multiple technology disciplines—from systems administration, IT security, and regulatory compliance to external device management and mobile applications—she continues to advance her knowledge and understanding of the continually evolving technology landscape. In 2018, Melanie joined SolarWinds to focus on the growth of the company’s DevOps products—Pingdom, AppOptics, Papertrail, and Loggly.

It’s complicated.

Running a hybrid Kubernetes environment, where Kubernetes clusters are deployed both on-premises and in the cloud, introduces new layers of complexity and presents unique operational challenges. Managing Kubernetes efficiently is already challenging. Many organizations struggle with the daily tasks of monitoring and managing the different Kubernetes components like clusters, nodes, pods, services, and deployments.

Complexity increases in a hybrid Kubernetes. Hybrid Kubernetes deployments offer the potential to optimize costs by leveraging the strengths of both on-premises and cloud environments. To effectively implement it, you must ensure seamless communication between clusters in different environments, maintain data consistency across distributed databases and stateful applications, and address the varied compliance requirements and technology interoperability constraints. All this while minimizing costs, maintaining scalability, and assuring performance.

Standards matter

Planning and defining strategies are crucial when designing and implementing hybrid Kubernetes. Careful planning uncovers the operational pitfalls and risks upfront; from here, teams can mitigate their impact with strategies such as automated scaling or backup and recovery.  Ensuring consistent configurations across multiple environments is also essential for effective management and operations. Take a look at the core system design principles below. Defined policies and standards like these can go a long way to achieving consistency:

• Establish clear naming conventions for resources like namespaces, deployments, and services to improve readability and maintainability.
• Implement consistent network policies to control traffic flow and isolate services across different environments.
• Define and enforce security policies, such as access controls, vulnerability scanning, and encryption, to protect sensitive data and meet compliance requirements
• Establish data backup, retention, and disaster recovery policies to ensure data consistency and availability.
• Define and enforce consistent configurations across both on-premises and cloud clusters.

Many organizations leverage automation and tools to define and enforce policies and standards, while others rely on extensive documentation and oversight. The approaches may vary, but effective planning and defined policies and standards enable organizations to identify the most cost-effective options for different workloads, optimize performance outcomes, and meet business goals.

The right tool for the job

Tooling can be crucial in defining and enforcing standards in hybrid Kubernetes environments. The balance to find is adopting tooling to support strategies while aligning tooling with the familiarity and expertise of the operations teams. If the cloud-native operations team is more comfortable with open-source tools, they may prefer to use frameworks like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Istio. However, if the on-premises operations team has extensive experience with commercial software, they may be more inclined to use a commercial platform like Red Hat OpenShift.

As with most tooling decisions, budget is usually a factor. For example, open-source tools are generally free, while commercial tools often involve licensing costs. Compatibility with other systems in the organization is often an important consideration, as are the tool’s performance and scalability characteristics. Cost savings or performance goals may need to be weighed against the tool’s security and compliance features, especially in regulated industries.

Plan for failure

Hybrid Kubernetes introduces additional layers of complexity.  This increases the number of potential failure points and exacerbates the operational impacts when problems arise. With the diverse range of tooling needed to support hybrid Kubernetes and the day-to-day management complexities in hybrid deployment, organizations frequently implement an equally varied assortment of monitoring tools. While each tool offers valuable insights, the sheer volume of data and disparate formats can make it difficult to troubleshoot and identify the cause of performance incidents.

Multiple siloed monitoring tools can create visibility gaps and cross-team collaboration challenges, especially in a hybrid environment. The lack of a shared, holistic view of the environment results in:

• Unforeseen outages and service interruptions arising from performance issues that go unnoticed.
• Increased mean time to resolution (MTTR) as limited visibility introduces delays in the troubleshooting process.
• Increased security concerns as delays in mitigating and detecting security threats are introduced by fragmented visibility.

Kubernetes Observability designed for hybrid

Observability goes beyond simply monitoring performance to understanding a system’s internal state by analyzing its outputs. This means it is ideally suited to address the visibility gaps. Observability connects and correlates data from across the diverse technology landscape to provide a holistic view of system behavior, which is crucial in a hybrid Kubernetes environment. Observability enables organizations to visualize and understand the intricate workings of complex systems, gain deep visibility, and eliminate blind spots.

With holistic visibility, organizations can identify and mitigate emerging issues before they impact services. When an issue occurs, understanding the systems and relationships can accelerate the process of diagnosing and addressing it. It can simplify identifying bottlenecks and underutilized resources and enable organizations to optimize performance while maximizing cost-effectiveness.

“Everything and Anywhere” with Hybrid Kubernetes Observability

Hybrid Kubernetes Observability is designed to support organizations regardless of deployment strategy for their Kubernetes environment, whether legacy on-prem, hybrid, or cloud-native. It can support them if their needs or strategies evolve over time, which is key for long-term operational success.

The ability to monitor and observe everything Kubernetes enables organizations to manage their on-prem, hybrid, and cloud-native Kubernetes ecosystems with comprehensive visibility across the network, infrastructure, database, applications, user experience, and security stack.

Observability also allows organizations to choose how they want to monitor and observe their environment. Whether organizations prefer a solution deployed on-prem behind a firewall or as a SaaS-delivered cloud-native solution, they can develop an observability solution customized to their requirements.

An observability solution designed to meet the needs of Hybrid Kubernetes can provide:

• A single pane of glass across diverse Kubernetes components and technologies deployed cloud-native, on-premises, and hybrid to deliver a comprehensive overview of the Kubernetes environment and facilitate collaborations among teams.
• Comprehensive performance monitoring to expedite problem resolution, identify anomalies, and enable proactive management across hybrid environments.
• System insights designed to be used to improve performance, optimize costs, reduce security risk, and support informed decision-making.

With the multitude of tools specializing in discrete areas of the Kubernetes ecosystem, a holistic hybrid Kubernetes observability solution can seem unnecessary.  However, Kubernetes observability that delivers a unified view across hybrid Kubernetes environments can streamline operational management and provide the power to transform development, operational, and business decision-making.