How Cloudticity Automates Kubernetes on AWS

As healthcare organizations leverage the public cloud to build complex multi-tiered applications, they are finding it increasingly difficult to deploy and manage these systems in a secure, scalable, and consistent manner.  To solve some of these problems, organizations are turning to containerization as a means to provide a consistent deployment and operational platform regardless of environment.

But even with containers, you are left with the problem of how to orchestrate all of these disparate pieces of architecture and make sure they operate securely as a cohesive system. This is where Kubernetes comes into the picture. Kubernetes provides the framework for running distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and most importantly, it ensures your deployments are secure and consistent every time. 

Here’s where it gets tricky. Implementing Kubernetes clusters requires resources and expertise that most companies just don’t have. Even for a seasoned Kubernetes expert, setting up a basic Kubernetes cluster manually can take hours. If you factor in the need to implement proper security, alerting, health checks, and dashboards, Kubernetes management quickly becomes a full-time job.

In fact, many companies that are currently using Kubernetes have a dedicated Kubernetes team or person. These people implement Kubernetes, ensure resources are properly tagged, set up node groups, security groups, logging, alerting, and ensure Kubernetes is deployed into the proper private subnets. Those companies experience benefits such as increased agility, efficiency, and scalability.

But for most companies, hiring someone to just do Kubernetes isn’t plausible. You’re already balancing a tight budget with limited resources and growing customer demands.

That’s why we’ve added Cloudticity Managed Kubernetes to our managed cloud solution. Now, healthcare organizations can leverage AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) without the overhead of managing them. 

The Solution

With Cloudticity Managed Kubernetes, your focus no longer has to be on creating and configuring your clusters.  You simply add some basic values to our template and the automated workflow does all the heavy lifting; leaving you more time to focus on your applications.  

Based on EKS, Cloudticity Managed Kubernetes provides many options for creating your clusters including: hardened images, instance types selection, a choice of managed node groups or Fargate profiles, and public or private API endpoints.  All of this delivered in a single deployment workflow.

Once created, your cluster will include a full suite of control plane logging, node metrics, container insights, alerting, and even the Kubernetes dashboard – all of which are add-ons for Kubernetes and require expertise to configure. With the Cloudticity solution, you get all of this, preconfigured, out of the box.

Many packaged Kubernetes offerings are limited and inflexible. Cloudticity designed Managed Kubernetes to offer a variety of configuration options - you simply specify parameters on launch to automatically spin up node groups that have the proper tags and configurations. No other solution on the market offers this full, end-to-end automation of Kubernetes.

But wait, there’s more.

Cloudticity’s solution automatically deploys clusters in a secure, HIPAA-compliant manner, providing encryption, secure images, auto-remediation, and security group configuration, while ensuring you’re deploying infrastructure into the proper subnets with appropriate routing and ACLs. 

With our solution, your hours of configuration just got reduced to a few moments. 

See the cluster creation workflow below:

The Bigger Picture

Because our Managed Kubernetes is included with our managed cloud solution, Cloudticity customers can monitor their entire AWS infrastructure on a single console. That means contextual data about security, compliance, availability, performance, and cost-efficiency for all AWS services can be found in one place.

Other Managed Kubernetes solutions on the market may have alerts and a dashboard, but without true integration, you’re not getting the full picture. You need a holistic view and full feedback in the monitoring if you want to reduce the noise and utilize auto-remediation.

To top it off, our Managed Kubernetes solution is tied in with our help desk. So any issues that don’t auto-resolve themselves will quickly produce alerts and get taken care of by our 24/7 support team.

Getting Started

It may sound too good to be true, but here at Cloudticity, we believe this is the way of the future. As infrastructure becomes increasingly more automated, the demand for humans to manage it steadily declines, and so does the complexity and the risk.

Organizations that leverage fully automated infrastructure solutions, such as Cloudticity Managed Kubernetes, will benefit by freeing up IT resources to focus on growth instead of maintenance. Organizations that still deploy infrastructure manually will be stifling their own growth potential.

Schedule a free consultation to learn how you can leverage Kubernetes without the overhead of managing them.