Why Mercedes-Benz runs on 900 Kubernetes clusters
By Scott Carey
Managing Editor, News, InfoWorld |
The technology team behind the German automaker Mercedes-Benz has spent the last seven years building up a homegrown fleet of 900 Kubernetes clusters to support hundreds of standalone developer teams, giving the company a modern infrastructure platform it says is scalable and easy to manage.
The automaker started dabbling with Kubernetes for application deployment in 2015, after Google open sourced the container orchestration system in 2014. Since then, Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation—the fully-owned technology-focused subsidiary of the storied automaker—has developed the internal expertise to support hundreds of business unit-aligned application teams with their own unique technology needs.
“We knew a single shared [Kubernetes] cluster wouldn’t fit our needs, no vendor distribution fit our requirements, and we had the engineers with expertise,” Jens Erat, a devops engineer at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation said during KubeCon Europe last month. “We built a 100% FOSS [free open source software] platform build and developed by the same devops team, with no licensing issues or support requests.”
