Mercedes Uses 900 ‘Kubernetes’ to Run Projects, But What Are They?
Kubernetes is a platform for managing apps and workloads, and Mercedes relies heavily on them.
For the pen-protector level nerds out there, you’re seeing an abbreviated version of something very complex and dynamic. For those of us new to the world of Kubernetes, we have valid reason to describe what they are, and why Mercedes uses a whole bunch of them to automate tasks and softwares.
Mercedes as a whole is a vast company. They have their hand in just about every aspect of the transportation segment, so as such, they have hundreds of teams. Each of these segments of Mercedes has its own needs, and thats where the Kubernetes (or K8s) come in to make things extremely easy, according to InfoWorld.
Essentially, the open source platform offered by K8s offer the ability to manage workloads in almost an autonomous way, but also according to how the user decides to configure them. For Mercedes, this means that servers aren’t overloaded with redundant information. In all, Mercedes has 4 data centers worldwide.
Still trying to figure this all out? Well so is Mercedes. “Kubernetes for application projects is still hard. To consume Kubernetes as a devops team is sometimes hard,” said Peter Muller, Mercedes Benz Tech Innovation’s lead expert.
This is especially true when key words like “container orchestration,” “delcarative cluster creation,” and more are important it the whole process, yet are a bit beyond this author’s scope of technology slang. Still, for the tech savvy employees of Mercedes, these Kubernetes systems are shared instead of having to be developed by each application team. But the development team still needs a hand. Muller followed up with “Some teams are still on virtual machines and moving to a Kubernetes cluster, and they have to split up their monolith, understand how transactions are handled, think about asynchronous communication, and understand how Kubernetes works.” Again, that technology slang strikes again.
But the time spent building these K8s clusters is worth while. Mercedes claims it makes scaling easy, and easy to manage… once you are deep into the learning curve. With 900 K8s clusters already in play, the Mercedes team is well on their way to taking full advantage of this tech.
Photos: Mercedes-Benz
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