IBM’s journey to tens of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters

IBM Cloud has made a massive shift to Kubernetes. From an initial plan for a hosted Kubernetes public cloud offering it has snowballed to tens of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters running across more than 60 data centers around the globe, hosting 90% of the PaaS and SaaS services offered by IBM Cloud.

I spoke with Dan Berg, IBM Distinguished Engineer, to find out more about their journey, what triggered such a significant shift, and what they learned along the way.

So take me back to the beginning – how did this thing get started?

It must have been 3 years ago.  At that time, IBM had been building customer-facing services in the cloud for several years implemented as traditional VM or Cloud Foundry workloads. One of the services we offered was a container as a service (CaaS) platform that was built under the covers using Docker and OpenStack.  With this platform, we were the first in the industry to provide a true CaaS experience, but in some ways it was ahead of its time, and people weren’t ready to embrace a pure container as a service platform.

To this day we are still seeing double digit Continue reading