By Matt Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer, ClearDATA
Twitter: @cleardatacloud
Host of CTO Talk – #CTOTalk
All of my CTO Talk podcasts deal with the people, processes and technology in healthcare IT. But, this one is a little different. The thing that’s exciting about this episode is I got to really get to talk about a technical passion of mine. My guests on this episode are ClearDATA’s VP of Architecture, Adam Greenfield, AWS Technical Product Manager of our AWS Platform, Conor Colgan and our Google Product Manager Will Carlson.
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Together, the four of us got under the hood on Kubernetes and dove deep into the history, processes, architecture and even share some use cases from recent ClearDATA customers using our secure, multi-cloud Kubernetes. This podcast also offers developers and CTOs some insight on why our customers are choosing certain clouds – or multiple clouds – for their Kubernetes ecosystem.
Adam gives us some background on the rise of Kubernetes, starting from within the Google organization, and talks about how that work helped drive the containers movement forward. His theory for why Kubernetes has taken off like it has is because so many large organizations began investing in Kubernetes as they realized a pressing need for a container orchestration with better tooling and systems, especially around automation and scaling. Developers needed to be able to easily create new proofs of concept on production, with PHI, and be able to develop rapidly against that. Bringing Kubernetes to healthcare is making developers excited, specifically as they consider the security and scalability advantages.
Conor shares his view on Amazon’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), which ClearDATA supports. We discuss managing the control plane and working nodes and moving from manually controlling scaling to autoscaling, a big influencer in making Kubernetes the container orchestration layer of choice. Conor also talks about how EKS can integrate into the AWS services, plugging into the whole AWS ecosystem easily so your organization can consume services across the Amazon world.
Then, Will gives us his take on his recent work with the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Will endorses Google’s claim that GKE is a powerful cluster manager and enables developers to set up clusters in minutes. He’s seeing big interest in using Google’s AI and data analytics tool sets in tandem with Kubernetes. Developers are pairing apps against the GCP tools for machine learning, letting data scientists and developers find meaningful insights in huge data sets which they can now easily scale to run these massive workloads, then scale down when not needed. That creates efficiencies that save resources and money.
Adam dives into the various strengths of each platform and offer advice to Kubernetes newcomers including the important advantages of the separation of responsibilities Kubernetes offers. This is key to offering developers the head space to focus on the apps and their innovative ideas rather than infrastructure. He gets into the advantages of building reliable systems that separate the work plane from the data plane. Because of all this, they’re seeing interesting patterns with cloud and application transformation, and they’ll give some examples of that including data tracing.
You’ll hear Conor and Will share use cases from recent work with ClearDATA customers, and then the four of us talk about the road ahead for Kubernetes.
I think I’m most excited to see the automation of operations so developers can focus on their apps and the problems they are trying to solve in healthcare.
About the Show
On CTO Talk, technology expert Matt Ferrari discusses the issues, challenges, and opportunities transforming healthcare technology today, all from the CTO point of view. Tune in because when CTOs talk, health IT listens.
This article was originally published on ClearDATA and is republished here with permission.