Engineering Support, Final Thoughts, and Kubernetes Resources

With dynamic reconfiguration of the network, the replication mechanics of Kubernetes make horizontal scaling and (most) failover/recovery very straightforward. We haven’t yet reached the reactive scaling milestone, but we've laid the groundwork with the Kubernetes and Calico infrastructure, making one avenue to implement it straightforward: - Configure upper and lower bounds for service replication - Build a load analysis and scaling service (easy, right?) - If load patterns match the configured triggers in the scaling service (for example, request rate or volume above certain bounds), issue: kubectl scale --replicas=COUNT rc NAME This would allow us fine-grained control of autoscaling at the platform level, instead of from the applications themselves – but we’ll also evaluate [**Horizontal Pod Autoscaling**](/docs/user-guide/horizontal-pod-autoscaling/) in Kubernetes; which may suit our need without a custom service.  Keep an eye on [our GitHub account](https://github.com/skytap) and the [Skytap blog](https://www.skytap.com/blog/); as our solutions to problems like these mature, we hope to share what we’ve built with the open source community. **Engineering Support** A transition like our containerization project requires the engineers involved in maintaining and contributing to the platform change their workflow and learn new methods for creating and troubleshooting services.  Because a variety of learning styles require a multi-faceted approach, we handle this in three ways: with documentation, with direct outreach to engineers (that is, brownbag sessions or coaching teams), and by offering easy-to-access, ad-hoc support.   We continue to curate a collection of documents that provide guidance on transitioning classic services to Kubernetes, creating new services, and operating containerized services. Documentation isn’t for everyone, and sometimes it’s missing or incomplete despite our best efforts, so we also run an internal #kube-help Slack channel, where anyone can stop in for assistance or arrange a more in-depth face-to-face discussion. We have one more powerful support tool: we automatically construct and test prod-like environments that include this Kubernetes infrastructure, which allows engineers a lot of freedom to experiment and work with Kubernetes hands-on. We explore the details of automated environment delivery in more detail in [this post](https://www.skytap.com/blog/continuous-delivery-fully-functional-environments-skytap-part-1/). **Final Thoughts** We’ve had great success with Kubernetes and containerization in general, but we’ve certainly found that integrating with an existing full-stack environment has presented many challenges. While not exactly plug-and-play from an enterprise lifecycle standpoint, the flexibility and configurability of Kubernetes still remains a very powerful tool for building our modularized service ecosystem. We love application modernization challenges. The Skytap platform is well suited for these sorts of migration efforts – we run Skytap in Skytap, of course, which helped us tremendously in our Kubernetes integration project. If you’re planning modernization efforts of your own, [connect with us](https://www.skytap.com/), we’re happy to help. - [Download](http://get.k8s.io/) Kubernetes - Get involved with the Kubernetes project on [GitHub](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes)  - Post questions (or answer questions) on [Stack Overflow](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/kubernetes)  - Connect with the community on [Slack](http://slack.k8s.io/) - Follow us on Twitter [@Kubernetesio](https://twitter.com/kubernetesio) for latest updates

Skytap encourages open-source contributions and provides engineering support for their containerization project through documentation, direct outreach, and a dedicated Slack channel. They also automatically create production-like environments for engineers to experiment with Kubernetes. Skytap acknowledges challenges in integrating Kubernetes with existing full-stack environments but values its flexibility. They invite others to connect for modernization assistance. The concluding section provides links to download Kubernetes, contribute on GitHub, ask questions on Stack Overflow, join the Slack community, and follow Kubernetes on Twitter.