Is Kubernetes the Next Fault Domain?

Keith McClellan Keith McClellan is director, partner solutions engineering, at Cockroach Labs These days, most application architecture is distributed by default: connected microservices running in containers in a cloud environment. Organizations large and small now deploy thousands of containers every day — a complexity of scale that is almost incomprehensible. The vast majority of organizations depend upon Kubernetes (K8s) to orchestrate, automate and manage all these workloads. So what happens, then, when something happens with Kubernetes? A fault domain is the area of a distributed system that suffers the impact when a critical piece of infrastructure or network service experiences problems. Has Kubernetes become the next fault domain? Contemplating the disaster of a Kubernetes-related application failure is the stuff of DevOps nightmares. But in disaster, there is also opportunity: Kubernetes has the potential to help us have a common operating experience across data centers, cloud regions and even clouds by becoming the fault domain we design our high availability (HA) applications to survive. Kubernetes as Common Operating System Many distributed applications need to be distributed as close to users as possible, so let’s say we want to build a three-region cluster. Without Kubernetes, even in a single cloud, that means Continue reading