Kubernetes : Supporting Rapid Development for Millions of BOSE IoT Products
Let's analyze the case study of BOSE, one of the greatest company for Audio products & try to understand How BOSE is utilizing the power of Kubernetes to boost up their Deployments for their IoT Products…
WHY Kubernetes :
On 2013, the entire World witnessed the biggest Tech Innovation of Decade, when Solomon Hykes introduced Docker (Container Technology). Then Google introduced Kubernetes to the entire World on mid 2014. Within 1 year, Kubernetes & Container Technology became the most powerful & demanding tools. Everyone was talking about it & every company was trying to adopt it.
But Why ? What is the uniqueness of this product ?
Answer is “It’s Simple, Fast & Agile”.
- Day by day we are moving towards a future where ideas will have no values if we can't make the product out of it. Also if we are not fast enough in reaching to the end user with our product, then someone else will capture the market.
- From 2017, each & every company started focusing more on how they can streamline their processes faster, rather than focusing more on ideas. Companies started one trend that you don't need to make the whole product with all the features. Create one basic product/software & provide it to the customer.
- Now based on customer feedback start working & make your deployment pipeline so fast that within few days you can satisfy the needs of the customers. Also once you capture the market, start implementing more features on your product. Because if you waste your time in the deployment, testing etc. where ultimately customer is not getting any value, then you will fail in the race.
That's why Industry started to implement Kubernetes to speed up their Deployments. In this blog let's learn how much improvement BOSE is able to achieve after using Kubernetes.
BOSE Corporation :
BOSE Corporation is an American manufacturing company that predominantly sells audio equipment. BOSE is best known for its home audio systems and speakers, noise-cancelling headphones, professional audio products and automobile sound systems.
“At Bose, we’re obsessed with what matters most — the little details that make an impact and the big details that astonish” — BOSE Corporation
From the starting of Digital Era, BOSE is always focused on modernizing and adopting the latest tools & technologies so that they can maintain their space in this fast growing Industry. BOSE belongs to the very first few initial companies to adopt DevOps solutions like Container Technology & Kubernetes. Let's learn their challenges, solutions & the outcomes…
What's the Challenge ?
BOSE was famous for decades & as their user base was increasing rapidly, they needed to provide great support to their customers. For that reason, Engineers on BOSE tried to improve their old infrastructure with latest DevOps automation tools.
“We needed to provide a mechanism for developers to rapidly prototype and deploy services all the way to production pretty fast,” says Lead Cloud Engineer Josh West. “There were a lot of cloud capabilities we wanted to provide to support our audio equipment and experiences.”
- In 2016, they started building an entirely new infrastructure for their IoT platform & from the beginning they wanted a microservice architecture & platform as a service. First they were testing & prototyping Docker Swarm & Mesos Orchestration Solutions, but finally they adopted Kubernetes for their platform, running on AWS.
- The best part of Kubernetes is it’s rapid fast scalability & as they were using AWS, they never felt lack of resources. Which enables the company to handle any kind of traffic load very easily.
The primary goal: “To be one to two steps ahead of the different product groups so that we are never scrambling to catch up with their scale,” says Cloud Architecture Manager Dylan O’Mahony. “If they release a new connected product, we want to be already well ahead of being able to handle whatever scale that they’re going to throw at us.”
At that time Kubernetes was in version 1.5, but still it was so much mature that it could do much of what the team wanted and needed for the present and the future. O’Mahony points to Kubernetes’ portability, in case Bose decides to go multi-cloud.
How they improve ?
They created one great infrastructure using Kubernetes & the best capability of that setup was Developers never felt any changes in their way of developing the codes. Operation Team spent lots of time to fine tune the experience so that it becomes easier for developer to not think much about how their code gonna be deployed.
“Our developers interact with tools provided by our Ops team, and the Ops team run all of their tooling on top of Kubernetes,” says O’Mahony. “We try not to make direct Kubernetes access the only way. In fact, ideally, our developers wouldn’t even need to know that they’re running on Kubernetes.”
- Today, just one of Bose’s production clusters holds 1,800 namespaces/discrete services and 340 nodes. With about 100 engineers now onboarded, the platform infrastructure is now enabling 30,000 non-production deployments across dozens of microservices per year.
- In 2018, there were 1250+ production deployments. It’s a staggering improvement over some of Bose’s previous deployment processes, which supported far fewer deployments and services.
“Everybody on the team thinks in terms of automation, leaning out the processes, getting things done as quickly as possible. When you step back and look at what it means for a 50-plus-year-old speaker company to have that sort of culture, it really is quite incredible, and I think the tools that we use and the foundation that we’ve built with them is a huge piece of that.” — DYLAN O’MAHONY, CLOUD ARCHITECTURE MANAGER, BOSE
BOSE incorporated Prometheus monitoring from the beginning & in 2017, they were successfully serving over 3 million connected products.
Impact & Outcomes :
Now it's very much easier for BOSE to implement any kind of new products without even bothering about the scalability, security & deployments.
“We had a brand new service deployed from concept through coding and deployment all the way to production, including hardening, security testing and so forth, in less than two and a half weeks,” says O’Mahony.
- Also, along with Kubernetes, there are lot of technologies that come under CNCF Landscape such as Fluentd, CoreDNS, Jaeger & OpenTracing. BOSE has relied upon these technologies too throughout their journey of modernization.
“The CNCF Landscape quickly explains what’s going on in all the different areas from storage to cloud providers to automation and so forth,” says West. “This is our shopping cart to build a cloud infrastructure. We can go choose from the different aisles.”
And, he adds, “If it weren’t for Kubernetes and the rest of the CNCF projects being free open source software with such a strong community, we would never have achieved scale, or even gotten to launch on schedule.”
Similarly there are thousands of examples, that how Open Source has become the heart & soul for many companies. Also because of such huge community & contributions, these tools are maturing very rapidly to work on any kind of situations.
Future Goals :
BOSE has already started adopting serverless architectures & they wants to work on Service Mesh. Also as BOSE is a global brand, so they want to scale up their global network more.
“Getting our latency down by going multi-region is going to be a big focus for us,” says O’Mahony. “In order to make sure that our customers in Japan, Australia, and everywhere else are having a good experience, we want to have points of presence closer to them. It’s never been done at Bose before.”
Plus, they are unstoppable in making more devices. Innovation never gonna stop at BOSE. Day by day their user base is also increasing.
“We want to get to billions of connected products !” says West. “We have a lot going on to support many more of our business units at Bose in addition to the consumer electronics division, which we currently do. It’s only because of the cloud native landscape and the tools and the features that are available that we can provide such a fantastic cloud platform for all the developers and divisions that are trying to enable some pretty amazing experiences.”
Fun fact Cloud Architecture Manager Dylan O’Mahony thinks — “doing anything other than Kubernetes, I think, would be folly at this point.”
Final Words :
- Like BOSE, there are thousands of companies in today's Industry & most of them trying to adopt Kubernetes & Container Technologies because it's super fast, has great scalability & obviously it's secure. This new era of technologies has created one more options for all the Engineers to work on these fields for different companies. Which means learning these kind of DevOps tool can help to boost our career.
- I tried my level best to talk about Kubernetes & it's possibilities. Also we have seen one of the very much interesting used case. Just wanted to say, lastly if you like this blog, give some claps & leave your thoughts in the comments.
- I keep on writing Blogs on Machine Learning, DevOps Automation, Cloud Computing, Big Data etc. So, if you want to read future blogs of mine, follow me on Medium. You can also ping me on LinkedIn, checkout my LinkedIn profile below…
Thanks Everyone for reading. That’s all… Signing Off… 😊
