Does Kubernetes Hold the Key to Digital Transformation Scalability for Smart Communities?

From a user standpoint, “safe flexibility” is the term that makes sense. Users want to know their personal data is treated with the utmost security and safety. They also want the convenience and flexibility of changing their minds as many times as necessary.

Imagine that you are taking a five-day business trip for an event in downtown Los Angeles. You decide not to rent a car due to parking costs and opt for a ride share from the airport to downtown. During your stay, you are about a mile from the event being held at the convention center. That week you walk and use micro-mobility, car-sharing, and public transit. By the end of the trip, you now have four new travel apps on your phone (all of which require separate account activation) and a fair amount of credit card charges.

Travelers have multiple options for transportation. One drawback is that each mode of transportation has its own app, causing travelers to create multiple accounts and share sensitive information with numerous companies.

You lack a single app that can provide all the transportation options available and their costs. In addition, you also traded personal security for convenience by establishing four different accounts that all store your relevant contact and banking information.

Several companies in the mobility space offer solutions to this challenge. Still, most are not at scale and follow a traditional model of proprietary workflows that are deployed and managed using monolithic design and reliance on microservices to execute.

Of course, this offers security benefits and allows for controlled future expansion. The problem is that the future is not likely to unfold with only a few major technology providers. CB Insights supported this view and released an impressive infographic on global unicorns in their Oct. 13 article, “$1B+ Market Map: The world’s 1,191 unicorn companies in one infographic.” This points to the need for smart communities seeking digital transformation, user satisfaction, and more control over their development environment to work with providers that run Kubernetes to provide open-source and DevOps ecosystems.

The benefits are not limited to transportation examples either. Let’s look at a second use case to make this relevant for smart communities.

Many forward-looking cities—such as the urban area of Coral Gables, Florida—emphasize the development of publicly available open-data portals, like the Coral Gables Smart City Hub. Coral Gables has transformed its interactions with its citizens by investing in smart management systems and innovative technology that collect data across its infrastructure.

Coral Gables invites innovators to seek partnerships that benefit citizens—tying them back to the core building blocks. A continued shift to Kubernetes-based development will provide the velocity and stability needed to expand their distributed provider ecosystem.

Rodulfo adds that “allowing as many providers to collaborate as possible while ensuring the protection of personal information, interoperability with municipal platforms, and compliance with regulatory frameworks may be the most important keys to the proliferation of smart communities everywhere.”

Reimagining your solutions in the cloud gives you the flexibility to integrate with other SaaS and PaaS.

There are primary ideas to consider when shifting your development process to using Kubernetes:

• Adopt a cloud-first mindset. The infrastructure needs are quite large for most companies. From a load balancing perspective, use the cloud when you need it, pay for what you use, scale up when needed, and scale down when the traffic is low.
• Let the technology work for you. There are numerous software solutions in the cloud. Use one that works for your workflow, rather than conforming the workflow to the technology. Conform the workflow to the user experience and have the technology bring value to you.
• Invest in a cloud-first mindset. Reimagine your solutions in the cloud. Do not move to the cloud in a lift-and-shift approach, and leverage SaaS (software as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service). Pick your SaaS or PaaS wisely and assess how they integrate with other SaaS and PaaS.
• Keep it simple. If changes to your infrastructures are scary, you won’t scale. Optimize your infrastructure, understand its dependencies, don’t be afraid to build new infrastructure, and remember to let technology work for you. Standing up an infrastructure should not take longer than a cup of coffee.

Plan for public cloud solutions by building as if you have infinite resources that require little concern but are available at a moment’s notice.

• Treat infrastructure as code: Write the infrastructure configuration as lines of code—saving time to stand up, migrate, upgrade, and downgrade your infrastructure.
• Containers: To put it simply, they are the next generation of virtual machines. They are lighter, and they come prepackaged and ready to run. Containerized solutions scale in the cloud vertically but, more importantly, horizontally.

Containers in a Pod work much like peas in a pod: if they serve the same, put them together. Containers give users the same experience developers have and vice versa. Developers see what users experience, eliminating the common “but-it’s-working-for-me” situations. Containers hold all the application dependencies and configurations, minimizing the length of traditional solution deployments that require web services, databases, network configuration, versions of java, .Net, or other third-party packages.

Communities across North America are searching for ways to use digital transformation to deliver equity, open their economy, and stake their claim within the growing smart communities’ ecosystem. Kubernetes can play a key role in this journey.