Kubernetes in industry: edge and datacenter

Over the last two years I have seen a sharp rise in requests to adopt and implement Kubernetes in industrial settings, both at startups and at established companies. Kubernetes gets picked to automate releases and the application lifecycle, to handle high availability, and to meet the requirements of off-the-shelf applications that by now run on Kubernetes.

The requests come in two kinds.

The first is the datacenter and cloud side: new projects or modernization projects. The difference from other sectors is that cloud native technologies are still barely adopted here. In fintech, for example, you almost always arrive after years of cloud native, with platforms already in place and habits already formed (not necessarily GOOD habits...). In industry, adoption is recent, and it is often the first architecture of this kind.

The second is the edge and IoT side: shipping and managing software inside industrial plants. Here the challenges are different, and not only at the infrastructure level.

The hardware changes, and that pushes toward lean distributions with less management complexity.

And above all, the connectivity changes. A remote site can have a flaky line, no redundancy, sometimes no connection at all for hours. An architecture designed for the datacenter takes a very good connection for granted. In plants, instead, you have to think not only at the infrastructure level but above all at the application level, with all the problems that come with distributed systems. You cannot, for example, take for granted that the data produced at the edge will reach a centralized database within a predictable time.