Home • Explore • Blog • CI
☰



kubernetes
1st chunk of `content/en/blog/_posts/2017-07-00-How-Watson-Health-Cloud-Deploys.md`
981d1c25afa9399743f4693e72d339ce8fa7bf44ee4eb6860000000100000826
---
title: " How Watson Health Cloud Deploys Applications with Kubernetes "
date: 2017-07-14
slug: how-watson-health-cloud-deploys
url: /blog/2017/07/How-Watson-Health-Cloud-Deploys
author: >
   Sandhya Kapoor (IBM)
---
Today’s post is by [Sandhya Kapoor](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyakapoor/), Senior Technologist, Watson Platform for Health, IBM



For more than a year, Watson Platform for Health at IBM deployed healthcare applications in virtual machines on our cloud platform. Because virtual machines had been a costly, heavyweight solution for us, we were interested to evaluate Kubernetes for our deployments.   


Our design was to set up the application and data containers in the same namespace, along with the required agents using sidecars, to meet security and compliance requirements in the healthcare industry.



I was able to run more processes on a single physical server than I could using a virtual machine. Also, running our applications in containers ensured optimal usage of system resources.



To orchestrate container deployment, we are using [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service infrastructure](https://cloud.ibm.com/containers-kubernetes/landing), a Kubernetes implementation by IBM for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts, providing container-centric infrastructure.



With Kubernetes, our developers can rapidly develop highly available applications by leveraging the power and flexibility of containers, and with integrated and secure volume service, we can store persistent data, share data between Kubernetes pods, and restore data when needed.



Here is a snapshot of Watson Care Manager, running inside a Kubernetes cluster:



 ![](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/LeKfLOkNldqReFh47f2AuFU42dhvKDwDxac_Psil_bdZWldKY80ZZi4Rv3n0--jq8Mqq9qRFVa1AbLIt9TIPLLRVmon4DaBsltFYbUJikrOp0qcavJQ9XHjRL-A1yvWR6mTNayBP)



 ![](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/EU3DgtFKagWp5S0UpKj-wRgx8WK2nvQ2BG-4dGio57pGNj42A7Lip9IARBba34hIm84-_7zwWt6iImQE8beSqLxpzXm-2w_84M_X2IHQ7jvpWtIDMF81hmq6N4hGSxp6DQoFW5qX)
Title: Watson Health Cloud's Kubernetes Deployment
Summary
This blog post discusses how Watson Health Cloud at IBM transitioned from virtual machines to Kubernetes for deploying healthcare applications. The author highlights the benefits of using Kubernetes, including improved resource utilization, faster development of highly available applications, and integrated secure volume services for persistent data storage and sharing. They also mention using IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service for container orchestration and provide a snapshot of Watson Care Manager running inside a Kubernetes cluster.