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Tl;dr: Our latest analysis of Kubernetes underscored its suitability for scaling Coinbase into the longer term. Up to now, a migration to Kubernetes raised issues as a result of operational burden of operating and securing the management aircraft in-house. We’ve now concluded that managed Kubernetes choices cut back this operational burden with out compromising our stack safety.
By Clare Curtis, Coinbase Employees Software program Engineer
Nearly two years in the past we launched a weblog put up detailing why Kubernetes will not be a part of our technical stack. On the time, migrating to Kubernetes would have created a complete new set of issues that outweighed any near-term advantages. Nonetheless, as these applied sciences have matured, our newly-formed Compute Group devised a method for leveraging Kubernetes in a approach that may ship a extra versatile and scalable model of our present system.
Coinbase has grown considerably since we first thought of migrating to Kubernetes. With any progress of this sort, you will need to prioritize scalability issues. As we proceed to scale, one of many predominant areas in want of future-proofing is Coinbase’s compute platform. In mid-2020, our largest service was configured to run a comparatively small variety of hosts, whereas right this moment it’s operating 10x that quantity.
On this similar interval, we quadrupled the scale of our engineering group inflicting a considerable enhance within the variety of deployments — every needing fully new hosts. The rise within the variety of deployments have raised issues over future scalability as we’re already operating into technical limitations of present APIs and assets. Recurring points with getting sufficient capability and having it delivered in an inexpensive timeframe, prompted a rise in failed deployments and required our largest companies to dramatically decelerate their launch course of.
Whereas these points are solvable, we determined to take this chance to judge whether or not it made sense to proceed investing in a homegrown system or think about an open supply different that will be way more scalable in the long run.
In our analysis of Kubernetes, we discovered that one of many greatest benefits of a migration is that it decouples host provisioning from service deployment, shifting the burden of managing host acquisition from particular person groups to the broader Infrastructure crew. This empowers the Infrastructure crew to take a holistic method to host administration. Additionally, capability constraints are much less prone to have an effect on deployments, and we cut back the quantity of cloud supplier particular information that particular person engineers want to keep up.
The Kubernetes group has created a wealth of data and tooling that we are able to make the most of to offer higher help to groups and shortly allow new options. Moreover, as Kubernetes is extensible, there may be nonetheless the choice to construct tooling internally and open supply it to be used throughout the wider group.
Safety is extremely essential at Coinbase and securing Kubernetes clusters is a non-trivial endeavor. Transitioning from highly-isolated and single-tenant compute to a system which promotes multi-tenancy requires deliberate safety design and consideration. As a result of we’ve got high-security workloads the place we’ve got to ensure isolation, we should run separate clusters and construct automated tooling that handles all cluster operations. Giving people entry to function high-security infrastructure will not be allowed.
Managed Kubernetes choices, comparable to AWS EKS, tackle the accountability of working, sustaining, and securing the management aircraft, decreasing the operational burden of operating many clusters. Lowering our operational burden and safety accountability permits us to concentrate on constructing the orchestration and automation that’s required to help many clusters throughout a big engineering group. EKS has considerably matured over the previous few years and proven that it offers steady, operational Kubernetes whereas additionally integrating with options which might be generally utilized in EC2 comparable to having the ability to connect safety teams to pods and IAM Roles to service accounts. Having these integrations reduces the chance and value related to migration, as they permit for migration with out having to vary the identification or entry patterns of our present platform.
Whereas the migration to Kubernetes spurred issues prior to now, we’ve now concluded that managed Kubernetes choices, comparable to AWS EKS, can cut back the operational burden with out compromising safety. In the end, we realized there’s a clear ceiling to the flexibility of our homegrown system to scale, and whereas there’s a giant arrange and migration price related to a transfer to Kubernetes, we’re assured that it is going to be extra versatile and scalable than our present system.
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