Kubernetes role in Spotify

Hello Amigos today I wanna share how Spotify using Kubernetes

Before dive into Spotify case study let’s get to know about what actually kubernetes is

Kubernetes is an extensible, portable, and open-source platform designed by Google in 2014. It is mainly used to automate the deployment, scaling, and operations of the container-based applications across the cluster of nodes. It is also designed for managing the services of containerized apps using different methods which provide the scalability, predictability, and high availability.

Features of Kubernetes

1. Pod: It is a deployment unit in Kubernetes with a single Internet protocol address.
2. Horizontal Scaling: It is an important feature in the Kubernetes. This feature uses a HorizontalPodAutoscalar to automatically increase or decrease the number of pods in a deployment, replication controller, replica set, or stateful set on the basis of observed CPU utilization.
3. Automatic Bin Packing: Kubernetes helps the user to declare the maximum and minimum resources of computers for their containers.
4. Service Discovery and load balancing: Kubernetes assigns the IP addresses and a Name of DNS for a set of containers, and also balances the load across them.
5. Automated rollouts and rollbacks: Using the rollouts, Kubernetes distributes the changes and updates to an application or its configuration. If any problem occurs in the system, then this technique rollbacks those changes for you immediately.
6. Persistent Storage: Kubernetes provides an essential feature called ‘persistent storage’ for storing the data, which cannot be lost after the pod is killed or rescheduled. Kubernetes supports various storage systems for storing the data, such as Google Compute Engine’s Persistent Disks (GCE PD) or Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS). It also provides the distributed file systems: NFS or GFS.
7. Self-Healing: This feature plays an important role in the concept of Kubernetes. Those containers which are failed during the execution process, Kubernetes restarts them automatically. And, those containers which do not reply to the user-defined health check, it stops them from working automatically.

Architecture of Kubernetes:

Now Let’s see Spotify Case study

Challenge

Spotify Launched in 2008, the audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world. “Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today — and hopefully the consumers we’ll have in the future,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure and Operations. An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify 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,” he says.

Solution

“We saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that,” says Chakrabarti. Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Plus, “we wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools.” At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence in the flourishing Kubernetes community. The migration, which would happen in parallel with Helios running, could go smoothly because “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a complement and now as a replacement to Helios,” says Chakrabarti.

Impact

The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for a migration, which started late that year and is a big focus for 2019. “A small percentage of our fleet has been migrated to Kubernetes, and some of the things that we’ve heard from our internal teams are that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” says Chakrabarti. The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling, says Site Reliability Engineer James Wen. Plus, he adds, “Before, 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 two- to threefold.

Thanks for Reading this case study