Managed Kubernetes for startups

Kubernetes adoption is on the rise. According to CNCF’s 2023 annual survey, 66% of potential and actual consumers were using Kubernetes in production, and 18% were evaluating it (84% total)—a 3% increase year over year in Kubernetes cluster adoption.

While there are times when it makes sense to self-host Kubernetes, maintaining self-hosted clusters is time and resource-intensive and requires a level of expertise that many small businesses lack. Implementing Managed Kubernetes for startups starts with planning the tech stack necessary for your application’s success. With proper planning, teams can move through their Kubernetes adoption journey—from planning to production.

Whether you’re a developer interested in hassle-free Kubernetes management, a startup needing a faster time to market, or an SMB that needs dynamic scaling capabilities, managed Kubernetes offerings like DigitalOcean Kubernetes can help you achieve your goals.

Choosing a managed Kubernetes provider

If your team has decided to implement a Managed Kubernetes offering, the next step is to choose a provider. When adopting Kubernetes, factors including the strength of the internal developer platform and ease of deploying cloud-native apps play a critical role. Consider the following:

1. Onboarding experience

A managed offering from a cloud provider should provide teams with a straightforward platform and accurate, up-to-date documentation. A simple platform allows teams to move faster and lessens the time to market.

2. Uptime Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Cloud providers and multiple services share a Service Level Agreement or a contract with their customers stating their targeted uptime for a service. If you’re planning to run in production, checking if an SLA exists for your service to cover you from outages is essential.

3. Upstream Kubernetes components

Find out if your managed Kubernetes provider has a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certification. Clouds certified by CNCF can demonstrate that their Kubernetes clusters conform to CNCF standards. CNCF-certified clusters conform to other Kubernetes installations. They provide timely updates and allow interoperability between Kubernetes installations. CNCF conformant clusters interoperability makes it easy to have hybrid cloud environments where you can spread your infrastructure across different cloud providers, on-premises, Internet of Things (IoT), and the edge.

4. Upgrades and patches

Will your provider allow you to choose whether you receive automatic clusters updates to new Kubernetes versions? For example, DigitalOcean allows developers to opt-in to automatic updates if they wish or get an update on-demand, allowing teams to select when their Kubernetes is updated manually.

5. Control plane and High Availability (HA)

The control plane is often seen as the brain or central nervous system of the Kubernetes cluster. It manages the worker nodes and pods in a cluster. In small setups, only one control plane might be installed on one of the nodes, often referred to as a primary node and the single point of failure. If your primary node crashes or is lost, you are left with worker nodes that may still run for a bit but no longer have a Kubernetes cluster. Having a Highly Available control plane means having multiple primary nodes to ensure your cluster is always running. For production, a Highly Available control plane is crucial and recommended even for on-prem infrastructure.

6. Pricing

Find out if providers include the control plane within initial pricing for a managed Kubernetes instance. DigitalOcean, for example, doesn’t charge for Kubernetes but only for the underlying resources used, and the cost for HA is minimal. Estimating your bandwidth costs can also be hard because they fluctuate with your users. Choose a cloud provider with transparent, consistent pricing targeting startups.

Planning infrastructure components

When designing and optimizing your cloud architecture, consider various components that will support your application’s scalability, performance, and reliability. Effective planning ensures that workloads are appropriately distributed, resources are efficiently utilized, and your system remains adaptable to changing requirements. This section explores key aspects of infrastructure planning.

1. Workload distribution

Do all workloads run on Kubernetes, or are they distributed across Kubernetes, VMs, and other compute platforms? For example, you may want to keep front end running on Droplets while moving backend jobs to Kubernetes and adding a load balancer and a managed MongoDB.

2. An opportunity for multi-cloud

Open source software like Kubernetes allows startups to avoid vendor lock-in by facilitating cloud migration projects to other clouds or spreading workloads across multiple clouds, while Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform easily provision environments. With Kubernetes, teams can pick up their whole infrastructure and run it the same way in different environments, easily moving networking, applications, and databases. Using Kubernetes, developers can mix and match services from different providers to best fit their solution.

3. Managed databases

While a large business can usually afford to hire employees with a deep knowledge of databases, smaller teams typically have fewer resources available. This makes tasks like replication, migrations, and backups more difficult and time-consuming. Managed Databases handle common database administration tasks such as setup, backups, and updates so you can focus more on your app and less on the database.

4. 1-Click applications

Certain cloud providers have 1-click applications. For example, DigitalOcean Marketplace provides a variety of apps and stacks that you can install to run pre-configured container images on Kubernetes clusters. Most Kubernetes 1-Click apps are Helm charts under the hood and require Helm 3 package manager to run.

5. Sizing your cluster

An oversized cluster is inefficient with its resources and costs more, but an undersized cluster running at full CPU or memory suffers performance issues and can crash under stress. Look at your node size and count to determine your cluster’s overall CPU, RAM, and storage. Larger nodes are easier to manage, are often more cost-efficient, and can run more demanding applications; however, they require more pod management and cause a more significant impact if they fail. Teams less familiar with Kubernetes may want to help to determine what resources their applications need. DigitalOcean has experts available to help.

Try DigitalOcean Kubernetes today

DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that lets you deploy Kubernetes clusters without the complexities of handling the control plane and containerized infrastructure. Clusters are compatible with standard Kubernetes toolchains and integrate natively with DigitalOcean Load Balancers and Block Storage volumes.

Here’s what Playflow Cloud, a game development platform, had to say about using DigitalOcean:

“My first foray into Kubernetes was on DigitalOcean. The simplicity of setting up Kubernetes clusters empowered me to automate and scale our game servers effortlessly.” - Haseeb, PlayFlow Cloud’s Founder and CEO

DigitalOcean Kubernetes is designed for you and your small business. Start small at just $10 monthly, and scale up and save with our free control plane and inexpensive bandwidth.

Sign up for DigitalOcean Kubernetes today.