Service interruptions caused by outages have severe consequences that range from harming a provider’s reputation to frustrating a customer to the point that they move to a competitor, so it’s extremely important to build and run resilient systems. Resiliency must be implemented at multiple levels from the bottom infrastructure layer to the application. For our customers, it’s a necessity that the EKS clusters they deploy their production applications onto be highly available.

One of the key features of Pipeline, our hybrid cloud container management platform, is its ability to provision Kubernetes clusters across multiple different cloud providers (Azure, Amazon, Google), private datacenters (vmWare, baremetal, etc), or any combination thereof. It does this by using either cloud provider-managed Kubernetes, or our own CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution - PKE. Each cloud provider’s internal LB is different, and so is the way each is integrated with Kubernetes.

Every major cloud provider offers a managed Kubernetes service that aims to simplify the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters in its respective environment. The Banzai Cloud Pipeline platform has always supported these major providers - AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba Cloud - turning their managed k8s services into a single solution-oriented application platform that allows enterprises to develop, deploy and securely scale container-based applications in multi-cloud environments. While this was very appealing from the outset, we quickly realized there was demand among our enterprise users to implement more sophisticated use cases that were limited by our initial approach.

At Banzai Cloud we are building a managed Cloud Native application and devops platform called Pipeline. Pipeline supercharges the development, deployment and scaling of container-based applications with native support for multi and hybrid-cloud environments. The Pipeline platform provides support for advanced scheduling that enables enterprises to run their workflows in an efficient way by scheduling workflows to nodes that meet the needs of the workflow (e.g.: CPU, memory, network, IO, spot price, etc).

As of version 1.6, Kubernetes provides role-based access control (RBAC) so that administrators can set up fine-grained access to a variety of Kubernetes resources. It would take too long to fully explain why it makes sense to use RBAC in this post, but, in a nutshell, RBAC provides a level of control that most enterprises need to meet their security requirements within Kubernetes clusters. Processes and human operators that assume the identity of a Kubernetes Service Account will authenticate with said account and gain its associated access rights.