In 2021, any time that you access any kind of web service, whether it be via a website or app, chances are high that the backend is running on Kubernetes. Hundreds of thousands of organizations rely on Kubernetes to power and manage their mission critical services every day, and the reliability and scalability benefits offered by Kubernetes have been felt across the industry.
However, there are still improvements that can be made, and while high-scale services are massively easier to manage with Kubernetes than well-adopted prior alternatives, the experience is far from perfect. Managing a large service deployment requires the developers and ops personnel who work on it to have excellent observability into the system. Even with Kubernetes’ autoscaling capabilities, managing the scale of a cluster can prove to be a difficult balance between cost efficiency and potential resource exhaustion. Security is also a major concern.
Splunk Observability Cloud, Splunk Cloud Platform, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot functionality fill in the gaps that many Kubernetes users experience today. Splunk Observability Cloud provides developers and operators with deep visibility into the composition, state, and ongoing issues within a cluster, and GKE Autopilot provides built-in security hardening and automatically manages a cluster’s resources to maximum efficiency.
Imagine the case of a large e-commerce company running a set of 50 different services in a Kubernetes cluster. In a standard Kubernetes deployment, Kubernetes would handle the creation and scale-out of workloads within the cluster’s predefined size limits, the restarting of containers that are failing basic health checks, and the internal network and external endpoints for each workload. This e-commerce company still has a lot of management ahead of them:
By using Splunk Observability and Splunk Cloud Platform and GKE Autopilot, this same e-commerce company can:
Splunk’s (and OpenTelemetry’s) support for GKE Autopilot is now available via OpenTelemetry Collector version 0.41 and above. Users can create a GKE Autopilot cluster and have it send data to existing Splunk Observability Cloud or Splunk Cloud Platform environments using the Splunk OpenTelemetry collector in seconds. Both destinations are options available during agent installation depending on your specific use case. Please refer to our documentation for more information on installation.
If you’re interested in trying out Splunk Observability Cloud on the Google Cloud Platform or anywhere else, you can get started today. Splunk Observability Cloud’s support for GKE autopilot is available, here.
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