We recently finished the first stage in a pretty big change to our web hosting infrastructure. We’ve moved all of our smaller backend services (everything except Panoptes, Ouroboros, and frontend code) into a Kubernetes cluster. I’m pretty excited about this change, so I wanted to share what we’ve done and what we’ll be doing next.

Kubernetes is what’s called a container orchestration system, which is a system that lets us run applications on a cluster of servers without having to worry about which specific server each thing is running on. There are a few different products out there that do this sort of thing, and prior to this we were using Docker Swarm. We didn’t find Docker Swarm to be a great fit for us, but we’re really pleased with Kubernetes and what it’s letting us do.

As a result of moving to Kubernetes, we’ve been able to fully automate the process of updating our server-side apps when we make changes to the code. This automation is important, because it means that the process of deploying updated code is no longer a bottleneck in our development process – it means that any member of our team can easily deploy changes, even in components they haven’t worked on before. This smooths out our development process and it should make our jobs a little easier, meaning we can more easily focus on the job of building the Zooniverse without our infrastructure getting in the way.

Not only has Kubernetes made it easier for us to automate things, but we’ve also found it to be a lot more reliable. So much so, in fact, that we’re now planning to move all of our web services into a Kubernetes cluster, including Panoptes and our main HTTP frontend servers. This is the part I’m really excited about! By making this change, we’ll be making our infrastructure a lot simpler to manage while also saving money by using our cloud computing resources more efficiently (since the cluster’s resources are pooled for everything to share). That should obviously be a huge win, because it will leave more time and money for everything else we do.

Watch this space for updates as we make more improvements to our infrastructure over the coming months!