Improving App Availability with Multizone Clusters
Downtime costs money and results in unhappy customers. Whether you have developed a new cloud-native application or repackaged an existing app to run as a container, now you need to ensure your app and the infrastructure running it are highly available. IBM is excited to announce the availability of multizone clusters, targeted for June 2018. Now within the same IBM Cloud region, you can deploy a Kubernetes cluster with worker nodes distributed across different zones (i.e., physical datacenters) ensuring your apps and clusters remain highly available. Kubernetes clusters now have a feature called a worker pool, which is a collection of worker nodes with the same flavor. Define the number of app instances and then let Kubernetes ensure the app is distributed across your zones.
What is IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service?
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) is a managed Kubernetes offering to deliver powerful tools, an intuitive user experience, and built-in security and isolation to enable rapid delivery of applications all while leveraging Cloud Services including cognitive capabilities from Watson. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides native Kubernetes capabilities such as intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery & load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. Additionally, IBM is adding capabilities to the container service including simplified cluster management, container security and isolation choices, ability to design your own cluster, leverage other IBM Cloud services such as Watson for your cognitive applications, completely native Kubernetes CLI and API, and integrated operational tools or support to bring your own tools to ensure operational consistency with other deployments.
How do I use Multizone Clusters in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service?
Log into IBM Cloud and create an account if you do not already have one.
From the ‘Catalog’ view, search for Kubernetes.
Learn more about the offering in the features page. Click Create when you are ready to continue.
Select the desired region (i.e., US South), and the zones that you’d like to deploy this cluster to.
Select the desired Kubernetes version, isolation choice for the worker nodes within your worker node pool, and desired worker nodes per zone.
Give the cluster a name, click ‘Create Cluster’ and before you know it you’ll be running apps in a highly available, managed Kubernetes cluster on IBM Cloud!
GPU Support in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Do you have resource-intensive, performance-dependent, machine learning workloads? GPU acceleration can be 10-20 times faster than with CPUs, which provides an optimized environment for artificial intelligence, large data manipulation, or other high-performance tasks. Now you can have GPU enabled bare metal worker nodes as part of your managed Kubernetes cluster within IBM Cloud. As part of the cluster creation process (or add a GPU enabled worker node to an existing cluster), select GPU bare metal flavors.
Join the Conversation
If you have questions or concerns, engage our team via Slack. You can register here (https://bxcs-slack-invite.mybluemix.net) and join the discussion in the #questions channel on https://ibm-container-service.slack.com.