How does AWS Kubernetes advance Innovation for Air Force Kubernetes with GSA MAS government contracts?

Cloud services have revolutionized the way enterprises do business. Innovations have become common-place due to the capabilities offered by cloud technologies and the ease of adopting these to software development and enterprise business processes.

In the 1990s and 2000s, many applications were monolithic and experienced long development cycles and quarterly or annual deployment cycles due to the difficulties of maintaining stability and post-deployment issues. Other issues included the giant tasks of managing on-premise physical servers, which could take from days to weeks to purchase and restore in case of failure.

The introduction of Virtual Machines came as a welcome change which further reduced these deployment times down to the range of hours. Containers improved these circumstances further making it possible to deploy instances within minutes and in much higher quantities.

Unlock the future of intelligent applications with our cutting-edge Generative AI integration services!

Containers were popularized by Docker in 2013 by making them accessible to the Information Technology industry. Thereafter came Google’s “Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)” which introduced managed Kubernetes to the general public. Kubernetes saw wide adoption with many enterprises big and small investing in Kubernetes to ensure that it was ready for mission-critical workloads.

These improvements in deployment methods led to a major shift in the application development and deployment space. Applications can now be deployed within minutes, making previous quarterly or monthly deployment cycles obsolete, and allowing for multiple iterations each day.

How does Kubernetes advance innovation?

1. Enhanced application development and deployment efficiencies
   One of the biggest barriers to innovation in the application development industry has been the long iterations to releasing new versions and the time required to deploy applications and ensure that there are no post-deployment issues.

Especially with larger monolithic applications, deployment becomes a goliath task because any failures can lead to the entire application becoming unavailable, causing large losses to the business. True adoption of Kubernetes can mitigate and avoid this type of issues in many ways.

This quick turnaround has greatly advanced innovation as it has allowed organizations to overcome failures and move forward with more and more new innovations. This is also thanks to the fact that they are able to roll back from failures within minutes due to the advances in Kubernetes management.

With smaller components that work together, deployments become much more convenient as teams can deploy their own micro-services even multiple times a day without much effect on other areas of the application system.

Many enterprises have opted to refactor their applications to represent micro-service components that work together. This has brought many benefits such as allowing smaller teams to work on each component making both development and deployment faster. Another benefit of this process is that there is no longer any restriction on the type of technology used for each component. As long as the interfaces between them remain unchanged, all components will function flawlessly.

The first and most important benefit is that an application that is truly adapted to Kubernetes architecture is no longer one that is bulky or needs to be deployed as one single unit. Micro-services is one of the other major contemporary technologies of the containerized revolution and the two could not have grown to such popularity on their own.

SERVICE DISABLED VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS (SDVOSB)

1. Optimized Costs and Economies of Scale

Cost optimization is another major factor that affects innovation. Gone are the days of over-provisioning servers and Virtual Machines to compensate for occasional spikes in user activity.

Managed AWS Kubernetes offer the capability of tightly packing applications in an optimized manner both in terms of resource usage as well as the number of nodes required. This frees finances to invest in innovations in business processes and application development.

The economies of scale offered by many managed Kubernetes providers, make the cost of maintaining even large clusters of managed Kubernetes only a fraction of that required for similar on-premise infrastructure. This is both due to the highly competitive rates offered as well as due to large technical teams and data centers no longer being required on-premise.

1. Intelligent Scalability and High-Availability

In today’s business environment, there is a multitude of applications offering the same goods and services. So the features your application(s) offer don’t exclusively determine your market share. Scalability and availability play a vital role in determining how many users frequent your application.

This used to be a major concern as scaling physical infrastructure required to manage older monolithic applications was a mammoth task. The introduction of Kubernetes has improved this significantly by making micro-service based components much more suitable for containerized environments so that they can be scaled as and when required without a major impact on the overall application infrastructure.

Applications that experience seasonal or occasional spikes in user activity have seen the most significant benefit in this regard and has lead to great innovations within government contracts.

1. Leveraged Features through Multi-Cloud integrations

Managed Kubernetes services providers offer different capabilities and features. These can both enhance businesses and lead to innovations that are practically impossible if attempted by client organizations on their own.

With older architectures, applications were limited to a single infrastructure provider or a type of cloud service such as private or public. However, Kubernetes have allowed applications to be more component-based and given them the ability to be deployed to multiple cloud services based on the services they require.

Some worthy examples are an authentication based component that can be deployed with a service that provides support for MS Active Directory or any other open-source auth provider. Another use case is the availability of AI, Machine Learning, Data mining and other services that can be leveraged by applications. So each component can be deployed in the most suitable cloud service while interfacing with each other as a single application.

Small Disadvantaged Business

Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) provides access to specialized skills and capabilities contributing to improved competitiveness and efficiency.

1. Seamless Cloud Migration

Cloud migration is another one of the biggest barriers to innovation. Many applications remain stagnant due to not being able to leverage the power of the cloud. This is due to the practical difficulties of a comprehensive refactoring process that requires both heavy finances and effort.

Kubernetes advance innovation has allowed such applications a pathway toward innovation through a shorter and more simpler process. Beginning with “Lifting and shifting” the application to an on-premise or cloud-based Kubernetes instance, organizations will be able to gradually progress with converting it to micro-service based components.

This will lead to applications being quickly improved in view of innovations due to the many benefits offered by Kubernetes and cloud services.

Conclusion

Kubernetes architecture has enabled many possibilities for organizations to innovate in numerous ways. Most of these are due to the micro-service based architecture encouraged by Kubernetes. In addition, it has enabled organizations to leverage cloud technologies without having to make an immediate shift from their monolithic architectures.

These benefits in terms of application development and deployment efficiencies, optimization of factors such as cost, scaling and the possibilities for leveraging the cloud have ensured that Kubernetes advance innovation propels applications into the next century.