Kubernetes and SingleStore: 5 Things You Absolutely Need to Know, Part 3

If you want to use Kubernetes to orchestrate SingleStoreDB instances, you’re part of a growing crowd. But deploying Kubernetes in a production environment is far more complex than a few clicks in a wizard. Too daunting? There’s good news: SingleStoreDB offers fully managed and self-managed services for Kubernetes. Easy!

If you’ve gotten through Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog, congratulations and thank you. It’s not easy to realize that building a Kubernetes production environment requires a data center’s worth of engineering and network expertise. To recap those blogs’ main points, here’s what you absolutely need to know:

Running a production Kubernetes cluster is different than a test environment.

• Minikube and simple GKE setup
• Kubernetes node topology; Scheduling details; VM resource sizing; Storage; Networking and observability
• No small engineering feat to accomplish

A Kubernetes production cluster environment is a multi-layered stack.

• Monitoring stack
• Capture metrics
• Alert based on metrics
• Configuration
• Paging
• Capture logging
• Dashboards

Each application in each stack requires competency.

Kubernetes novices face steep challenges.

• Not a strong understanding of the underlying technologies
• Lack of basic skills to support
• Infrastructure
• Network
• Storage
• Cloud idiosyncrasies
• Not familiar with container concepts and Kubernetes technology stack
• Difficult to troubleshoot root cause issues

In this blog I’ll cover the last two of the five things:

4. Singlestore Helios makes all of the above easy for you.

5. Still want to go alone? How Singlestore Helios fits into a production environment.

Relax. You’ve got this.

4. Singlestore Helios makes all of the above easy for you.

 All of the problems I’ve discussed in points 1, 2 and 3 disappear when you choose Singlestore Helios. Our team of Kubernetes experts handles every aspect of provisioning, operating, monitoring and maintaining your K8s clusters, which you can use to seamlessly orchestrate tens of thousands of instances of SingleStoreDB (or just a few—it’s up to you).

We know how to best optimize K8s for the three different cloud platforms, tuning your Kubernetes clusters to meet your specific needs.

You don’t need to worry about monitoring because our team keeps a watchful eye on your Kubernetes environment 24/7, dealing with issues in real time. We’ll notify you if there’s an impact, with an estimated time to remediate it. At any point you can reach out to your SingleStore account rep, sales rep or service rep, depending on what you need.

In addition to being experts in all things Kubernetes, our team delivers another layer of service you’ll definitely need: security. We deliver enterprise-grade security to protect your business, including role-based access control (RBAC) configurations to enable tiered, key-based entry to your managed Kubernetes environment.

Questions? Check out our guide on Kubernetes in SingleStoreDB

5. Still want to go alone? How Singlestore Helios fits into a production environment.

With Singlestore Helios for Kubernetes, we manage the entire environment, but you are in control of how you set up and use K8s and SingleStoreDB. From our Customer Portal you can spin up Kubernetes clusters in whatever configurations you desire — you can name the cluster, and specify the cloud platform and region you’d like it to live in. With a few clicks you can edit the number of nodes, gigabytes of RAM and modify storage. You’ll also get access to our Administration Portal.

With Singlestore Helios, being the boss of your own production Kubernetes environment gets a lot easier. For example, we recently upgraded 9,000 K8s clusters in three days through automation. Our Tech Support desk has fielded calls from customers rolling their own K8s clusters, which have taken months to upgrade.

SingleStoreDB’s Kubernetes Operator runs in your environment, providing a menu of choices while managing and orchestrating everything for you behind the scenes. We can scale out a cluster to add pods and leaf nodes. We can also scale it up; you can specify that Orchestrator create pods with eight CPU cores that scale up to 16 cores with twice the amount of memory when needed, dropping back to eight when the crush for extra processing power is over. You can do both—scale out and scale up—at the same time.

Behind the scenes, at every step of the way, SingleStoreDB delivers the entire Kubernetes technology stack, as well as your SingleStoreDB instances. Simply put, we make using Kubernetes and SingleStoreDB incredibly simple.

Thanks for coming along on my blog journey. I’m pretty sure you are now crystal-clear on everything you absolutely need to know about running a production cluster of Kubernetes for SingleStore orchestration.

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