What is IBM Managed Kubernetes Service?
IBM Cloud™ Kubernetes Service is a managed container service for the rapid delivery of applications that can bind to advanced services like IBM Watson® and blockchain. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes service also has advanced capabilities around simplified cluster management, container security and isolation policies, the ability to design your own cluster, and integrated operational tools for consistency in deployment.
Key features of managed kubernetes
Fully managed at scale
IBM Cloud — including IBM Watson® and IBM Blockchain Platform — runs on Kubernetes, enabling massive scale and workload diversity. Enjoy continuous availability with high-availability master-enabled, multi-zone clusters across 6 regions and 35 data centers.
Secure Kubernetes clusters
This highly secure environment for production workloads has built-in container-level security, including isolation policies, CIS-hardened infrastructure and broad industry compliance (including PCI, HIPPA-ready, SOC1, SOC2 and more).
Advanced services
Extend your app’s capabilities by integrating with advanced IBM services, such as AI, Watson and Blockchain, through an automated, standardized and secure architecture. This includes customer-managed Kubernetes secrets through IBM Cloud™ Key Protect.
Intelligent provisioning
Containers are automatically scheduled and placed onto available compute hosts, based on the requirements that you define and the availability in each cluster.
Self-healing containers
Configure a custom Kubernetes cluster that auto-scales and recovers containers, based on defined policies. Create health checks for critical components, such as containerd, kubelet, kube-proxy and calico, so that auto-recovery can trigger corrective action.
Logging and monitoring
Get operational visibility into Kubernetes-based applications, services and platforms. Advanced features help you monitor and troubleshoot, define alerts and design custom dashboards. Enjoy cluster-level, 30-day retention and natural-language processing with this fully centralized service.
Learn how to build with Kubernetes, Istio and Watson
How clients use it
Deploy a scalable web application on Kubernetes
This tutorial walks you through how to scaffold a web application, run it locally in a container and then deploy it to an IBM Cloud Kubernetes cluster. In addition, you’ll learn how to bind a custom domain, monitor the health of the environment and scale.
Analyze logs and monitor the health of Kubernetes application
This tutorial shows how the IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA service can be used to configure and access logs of a Kubernetes application that is deployed on IBM Cloud™. Here are the steps:
1. Deploy a Python application to a cluster provisioned on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.
2. Configure a LogDNA agent, generate different levels of application logs and access worker logs, pod logs or network logs.
3. Search, filter and visualize those logs through Log Analysis with LogDNA Web UI.
4. Set up the IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig service and configure Sysdig agent to monitor the performance and health of your application and your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster.
Continuous deployment to Kubernetes
This tutorial walks you through the process of setting up a continuous integration and delivery pipeline for containerized applications running on the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. Learn how to set up source control, then build, test and deploy the code to different deployment stages. Next, learn to add integrations to other services, like Slack notifications.
Create clusters
In this tutorial series, you can see how a fictional public relations firm uses Kubernetes capabilities to deploy a containerized app in the IBM Cloud. Leveraging Watson™ Tone Analyzer, the PR firm analyzes its press releases and receives feedback.
Clients using IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Think research
Empowering clinicians to provide fast and effective evidence-based care
Eurobits Technologies
Transforming the financial landscape with robust, security-rich services on IBM Cloud
The Weather Company
Migrating the world’s top weather web property to a highly secure, scalable global architecture in the IBM Cloud
Learn more about managed kubernetes and containers
Containers: A complete guide
Understand the role of containers in cloud computing and how they figure into technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, VMs and Knative.
Kubernetes: A complete guide
Everything you need to know about Kubernetes — a container orchestration tool that deploys, scales and manages containerized applications.
Knative: A complete guide
In this guide, learn about Knative and how it can help complement your Kubernetes system.