How Huawei used containerization and Kubernetes to solve the problem it was facing with Virtualization based approach
Brief Description of Huawei
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese multinational technology company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. It designs, develops, and sells telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics. The company was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former Deputy Regimental Chief in the People’s Liberation Army.
CEO: Ren Zhengfei (1988–)
Brands: Huawei, Honor (2013–2020)
Headquarters: Shenzhen, China
Parent organization: Huawei Investment & Holding Co., Ltd.
Challenge faced by Huawei before Containerization
A multinational company that’s the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, Huawei has more than 180,000 employees. In order to support its fast business development around the globe, Huawei has eight data centers for its internal I.T. department, which have been running 800+ applications in 100000+ VMs to serve these 180,000 users(who manage this). With the rapid increase of new applications, the cost and efficiency of management and deployment of VM-based apps all became critical challenges for business agility.
Above mentioned is the scale of the company and To solve the challenges faced by them with virtualization,
Solution for the above mentioned challenge/problem and advantages-
They decided to move towards containerization and for management, Use Kubernetes. So far, about 30 percent of these applications have been transferred to cloud native.
(30 percent is the percentage at the time of publishing this article at Kubernetes case study section).
According to the chief software architect and community director for opensource, by the end of 2016, Huawei’s internal I.T. department managed more than 4,000 nodes with tens of thousands containers using a Kubernetes-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution.
According to the company, The global deployment cycles decreased from a week to minutes, and the efficiency of application delivery has been improved 10 fold.
Containerization also saved a lot of company resources as well as investment in this area became 20–30 percent less which really helped the company in their business.
FusionStage is a new-generation Platform as a Service (FusionStage) for the software development, integration, management, and operation and maintenance (O&M) of large-scale high-reliable cloud services and numerous high-performance Internet applications.
Given the results Huawei has had internally and the demand it is seeing externally, the company has also built the technologies into FusionStage, the PaaS solution it offers its customers.
Brief about FusionStage (developed by huawei after seeing the results after adapting containerization and Kubernetes)
FusionStage is committed to building a software infrastructure layer, enabling the digital transformation in the full cloud era, and providing digital service support platform for cloud scenarios featuring resource pooling, full-distribution, and automation. Figure 35–1 shows the four pillars used to technically define FusionStage product positioning.
Reference- https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC1100062374/d7e2a4b5/what-is-fusionstage