As with everything, there are no silver bullets when it comes to deployment management, and Kubernetes is no exception. The end result with Kubernetes was positive — and we have no plans of moving away from it — but it has been a lot of work. We introduced many new technologies which used a very different terminology to what we were used to. It required re-educating not only the infrastructure team but also the product teams, since ownership of certain components would be shifting. The additional layers of abstraction (especially at the network level) make some situations harder to debug than usual.

We are happy with our current Kubernetes set up, but still have a lot of work to do: extending our deployments to other cloud providers like GCP and Azure (as well as on-premise, specifically for our build agents and internal infrastructure), investigating service meshes (such as Istio or Conduit) to improve connections between microservices, and making our deployment process as simple as possible.

Thought Machine is hiring for every role: backend, frontend, infrastructure, security, PMs, sales, etc. If any of this sounds interesting and you’d like to apply, please head over to Workable.