Kubernetes Fleet Management with Plural for Financial Services

Financial service institutions face constant pressure to deliver new services rapidly and at scale. At the same time, financial services is a highly regulated industry, requiring higher levels of access security controls, enforced isolation boundaries, and auditing of all Kubectl actions due to PCI regulatory requirements.

Fintech companies have aggressive cloud infrastructure goals with strict deadlines, and the overhead of maintaining Kubernetes fleets adds up when you scale. For starters, finding talented Kubernetes engineers is difficult and quite costly, and smaller DevOps teams are devoting high levels of attention to managing Kubernetes details vs. focusing on higher-value work.

It is also quite difficult and time-consuming to upgrade Kubernetes versions since you don’t know which compatibility problems will arise until they pop up. Ultimately, it slows down the pace you can release software and cuts into your bottom line.

And, to top it all off, gaining a single, unified view of all your applications and clusters spanning across various cloud providers, on-prem, and edge environments increases in complexity as you scale upwards.

As organizations expand their Kubernetes cluster presence, establishing a standardized approach to Kubernetes management across different teams is necessary. This means adopting a robust Kubernetes fleet management platform, especially as stringent industry regulations come into play.

In this article, we will cover problems engineering teams face in financial services industry, and how we plan to solve them at Plural.

How does Plural address challenges faced by engineers in financial services organizations?

After talking with hundreds of engineering leaders in the financial services industry, we can break down the problems engineering teams face into five parts.

Plural for Kubernetes Fleet Management

Building and maintaining scalable and reliable infrastructure shouldn’t slow down innovation. Application team's priorities shouldn’t be focused on setting up and maintaining their environments. Instead, they should be focusing on building applications and meeting the growing needs of their customers.

Currently, the barrier to entry to working with Kubernetes is high and slows down fast-moving teams' adoption of Kubernetes at scale. Plural allows any engineer to easily manage their Kubernetes ecosystem anywhere - securely and at scale -  in a single pane of glass regardless of expertise.

Plural is a self-hosted Kubernetes fleet management platform that provides a single pane of glass, removing the complexity of managing Kubernetes clusters at scale. With Plural, engineering teams can gain visibility, automation, governance, and security capabilities in an easily adaptable platform to manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters across public clouds such as AWS, Azure, and GCP as well as on-prem and remote/edge locations.

With Plural, engineering teams can do the following:

• Plural will give your engineering organization multi-cluster visibility into your entire cluster fleet across various environments. With Plural, your engineers get self-service access to Kubernetes clusters and automated cluster lifecycle management using proven templates with guardrails included.
• Manage Kubernetes clusters and add-on upgrades in a single, intuitive interface and confidently know that upgrading a Kubernetes version won’t break anything downstream. Plural will help you with upgrading the control plane, Kubernetes add-ons, and your services. With Plural, you’ll be made aware if you have a compatible version of your add-ons for the version of Kubernetes you are upgrading.
• Share the responsibility of managing Kubernetes tasks with a broader subset of your engineers, including those without prior Kubernetes experience. Top-tier Kubernetes talent is costly and hard to attain. Managing infrastructure shouldn’t be challenging and pricey, and your most skilled engineers should focus on building out awesome product features to drive business value. With Plural, your team can create standard workflows to automate time-tedious and challenging tasks of configuring, and provisioning clusters across fleets in one patch rather than following the manual, error-prone process today that makes managing Kubernetes clusters challenging.

To learn more about Plural’s self-hosted fleet Kubernetes fleet management platform sign up for a custom product demo to learn more.