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Tl;dr: Our current analysis of Kubernetes underscored its suitability for scaling Coinbase into the long run. Prior to now, a migration to Kubernetes raised issues because of the operational burden of working 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 Workers 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 manner 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 development of this type, it is very important prioritize scalability issues. As we proceed to scale, one of many most important 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 in the present day it’s working 10x that quantity.
On this identical interval, we quadrupled the scale of our engineering group inflicting a considerable improve 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 working into technical limitations of present APIs and assets. Recurring points with getting sufficient capability and having it delivered in an affordable timeframe, triggered 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 guage whether or not it made sense to proceed investing in a homegrown system or take into account an open supply various that might be rather more scalable in the long run.
In our analysis of Kubernetes, we discovered that one of many largest 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 more likely to have an effect on deployments, and we cut back the quantity of cloud supplier particular information that particular person engineers want to take care of.
The Kubernetes group has created a wealth of information and tooling that we will make the most of to supply higher assist 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 inside the wider group.
Safety is extremely vital at Coinbase and securing Kubernetes clusters is a non-trivial enterprise. 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 have now high-security workloads the place we have now 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 duty of working, sustaining, and securing the management aircraft, decreasing the operational burden of working many clusters. Decreasing our operational burden and safety duty permits us to deal with constructing the orchestration and automation that’s required to assist many clusters throughout a big engineering group. EKS has considerably matured over the previous few years and proven that it offers secure, operational Kubernetes whereas additionally integrating with options which are 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 danger 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 up to now, we’ve now concluded that managed Kubernetes choices, comparable to AWS EKS, can cut back the operational burden with out compromising safety. Finally, we realized there’s a clear ceiling to the power of our homegrown system to scale, and whereas there’s a massive arrange and migration price related to a transfer to Kubernetes, we’re assured that will probably be extra versatile and scalable than our present system.
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