Cloud Adoption Is Soaring, and So Is Demand for Kubernetes-Based Services

Sandeep Rajan

One of the biggest technology trends to come out of the pandemic is enterprises accelerating their cloud adoption. As more businesses use cloud computing for applications, storage and more, channel partners are finding new opportunities to help their customers run and manage cloud services. One of the fastest-growing cloud marketplace segments is services involving the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

Kubernetes is one of the most popular cluster management software solutions, which enables smooth automated app deployment, operability and scalability. Kubernetes provides production runtime environments with highly manageable container-based applications at scale. For example, if an application can be containerized, it can be run and governed by Kubernetes. Backed by Kubernetes, companies can significantly increase their on-prem or cloud-hosted infrastructure utilization as all the computational resources are dynamically and reasonably shared across multiple app-driven processes.

Where the Channel Should Focus Its Kubernetes Expertise

If there’s one thing that nearly every sysadmin agrees on, it’s that a majority of network problems can be traced back to a domain name system (DNS) blunder. Fast-moving containers and cloud-native computing can exacerbate DNS problems.

One of the biggest respites to the DNS problem is CoreDNS, a DNS server designed expressly to be extensible, fast and flexible. CoreDNS has been the default DNS add-on since Kubernetes v1.11 and is vital for having a functional Kubernetes cluster.

When a program calls on CoreDNS to resolve a query, it passes the data through a chain of add-in functions (i.e., plug-ins) until it reaches one that can resolve the query, making it easily customizable for cloud-native microservices discovery and other services.

There’s been an increasing demand from end-users to manage the health, status, rollout and rollback of CoreDNS in a Kubernetes cluster; and not just rely on CoreDNS being managed by the cluster management tools. These tasks used to be complicated, especially with CoreDNS, one of the most complicated add-ons.

OperatorHub.io and the Critical Role of Operators

Software developers and channel partners have a useful tool – the OperatorHub.io public registry – to help their customers demystify the complications and challenging learning curve of Kubernetes deployments. OperatorHub.io includes a growing collection of integrated Kubernetes-native applications called Operators that can be used to get customers on a more straightforward path with the open-source container management system.

For example, the CoreDNS Operator is capable of installing CoreDNS, upgrading the CoreDNS version and migrating the Corefile automatically to ensure it’s up to date and compatible with any version of CoreDNS, providing the user with a seamless experience.

The Operator continuously monitors the CoreDNS resources (Deployment, ConfigMap, Service, etc.) with a controller’s help.

The CoreDNS specifications can be modified through the CustomResource (CR).

The CoreDNS Version, DNS Domain, DNS IP and Corefile can be modified by modifying the CR spec. The Controller will register the changes applied to …