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Jan 31, 2019 | 3 minute read
written by Jennia Williamson
2018 was a great year for Elastic Path: we opened a new office in the heart of Boston, had new members join our team, and got attention from the commerce community globally. Our customers keep inspiring us with unique use cases that demand innovative and lightweight solutions, such as mobile self-checkout, In-content commerce, IoT, progressive web applications, and many more.
As Elastic Path continues growing its functional offerings and user base, our core pillars have not changed: we strive for high availability, robustness, and flexibility. For that reason, over the past few months, our engineering team has been focused on making sure that Elastic Path is optimized and ready for the future that we and our customers envision.
Today we are excited to announce the first foundational release of this theme: Elastic Path's architecture now incorporates Kubernetes - an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
1. Architecture and ease of use - The main reason why we went with Kubernetes is the technology itself. Kubernetes not only came in leading in the number of 'wish-list' items it could solve for us, but also it proved to be straightforward and easy to use. Once a POC was built, the knowledge transfer across the team was a breeze, allowing us to fire on all cylinders during development. Additionally, Kubernetes has excellent documentation and a strong and growing community proving the fact that it is the right addition to our architecture.
2. Hands-off experience - One of the objectives of this project has been to decrease engineering involvement in day-to-day operations. In simple terms, Kubernetes "just runs", meaning more time for us to focus on the new and exciting features, without worrying about steps to ship that code to production.
3. Nondisruptive solution - While considering this change, our main goal was to choose not only an adequate technology, but also one that supports organic growth. By introducing Kubernetes to our technology stack we didn’t want to introduce any additional steps from our customers. in fact, if you are a current customer, you are already running on the new infrastructure! Additionally, this release does not impact our current onboarding process for new customers, nor does it increases our prices.
1. Elastic Path goes global - Introducing Kubernetes to our stack gives us a lot of opportunities to continue advancing our scale. It also opens up a much faster process for us to release additional data centers.
2. Elastic Path gets lightning fast - While adding Kubernetes to our stack, we also implemented a new flexible layer above our DNS. We’re looking forward to showcasing some huge speed improvements coming up.
The last few months of 2018 were all about laying a strong foundation that can withstand our growth in the coming years. Incorporating a new orchestration layer into our stack was an important strategic step and while there is still a lot of work ahead of us we are incredibly proud and excited to take this journey with the Kubernetes community, and bring Elastic Path to the next level.
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