Taikun and its orchestration magic¶
The top 3 cloud service providers i.e. AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, all provide Kubernetes cluster services. Each Cloud provider has certain advantages over others and is better suited for certain use cases more than others.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS) is the most widely used managed Kubernetes services (as per CNCF report of 2021). It is also least pre-configured, which means there is more control available for use but requires more knowledge to operate the K8s properly. EKS is generally pricier than others.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is often the most cost-effective as Control Plane is free with the offering. The billing is on per node usage. AKS also offers more pre-configured options than AWS’ EKS.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the most automated of the three. GKE also provides the most options in terms of versions. Since Kubernetes came from the Google stable, most of the latest versions of Kubernetes are supported on GKE.
Openstack and Kubernetes are deeply integrated and work together very well. However, setting it up in a private cloud is the most manual of all approaches and requires a good understanding of the systems in play. This manual setup also brings the huge advantage of customizability for the Cloud engineers.
Given this wide variety of strengths and weaknesses in each kind of setup, it is natural for any organisation to have multiple cloud providers for their Kubernetes cluster setups. This inevitability also brings in high levels of complexity to manage the clusters systems.
Taikun can help solve this problem.
How Taikun abstracts the complexity¶
In simple words, Taikun sits on top of the various types of cloud and manages them using API calls provided by these cloud providers. It goes one step further by giving a simple UI for the user to work with.
Taikun also gives additional features like better access control, detailed monitoring, logging and alerting capabilities, billing segmentation based on usage by teams and many more.
Taikun thus acts as a single pane of glass dashboard for monitoring and your Kubernetes management. Kubernetes environments are fully customizable with various types of access profiles, Kube configs and versions.
Taikun also provides options to control your infrastructure costs by setting billing rules to avoid overspending.
Magic of Organization and Projects in Taikun¶
The abstraction over multiple cloud providers is done using the concept of Organization and Projects in Taikun. Taikun allows multiple Projects to be created under a single Organization. Each Project can be of a different Cloud Type like Openstack, AWS etc.
This allows the user to see how each K8 cluster is doing in their cloud. The dashboard shows an overview of how the entire Organization is doing.
Better access control¶
The capabilities of the Cloud teams are further enhanced with better access profiling and control. This also helps control the billing as only certain users can spawn new clusters.
Taikun offers three kinds of users on its system - User, Manager and Partner:
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A User cannot create new projects but can manage and operate projects. So, a user can create/manage clusters, see the overview of projects, servers or cloud credentials for the organization.
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A Manager can do everything a user can and some more. A manager can manage users, create projects, add new cloud credentials and set up backups, within an organization.
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A Partner is a Taikun user with maximum privileges. A partner can have several organizations under his control. A partner can also add new organizations and create new billing rules.
The robust access control features help Taikun’s customers separate roles and responsibilities within a team in a more granular manner. It also helps avoid managing multiple access control policies separately for each cloud setup.
Consistent and predictable experience¶
Taikun’s parent Itera is a silver member of CNCF and all the deployments are CNCF certified. This means that every Kubernetes installation created via Taikun will be similar across all cloud platforms. This enables interoperability from one Kubernetes installation to the next and helps the team stay cloud largely vendor-agnostic.
CNCF certified Kubernetes installations also mean the latest stable release of Kubernetes will be available for use in the clusters.
Taikun, can thus help in orchestration across multiple cloud platforms and provide a common smooth interface to interact with each in a similar and predictable manner.
Please contact us to explore our solution in more detail and for a free consultation.
If you wish to read more about Taikun and how it works, please refer to our Taikun Landing Page.