Kubernetes in AWS

For the cloud migration decision-making process, we considered several criteria, including the following strategic considerations:
 

• Investment strategy: We analysed and evaluated the long-term investment costs and considered the benefits of a cloud-based infrastructure in terms of scalability, flexibility and cost efficiency to optimise our investments.
  
  
• Innovation strategy: Our innovation strategy aimed to promote the use of modern technologies and agile development methods. The cloud provides an ideal environment for innovation with quick access to resources and tools and facilitates application scalability.
  
  
• Infrastructure strategy: We assessed our existing infrastructure to determine if a cloud migration would offer better scalability, availability and manageability. By using the cloud, we could benefit from the flexibility and highly available services of AWS.
  
  
• Procurement strategy: As part of our procurement strategy, we analysed and evaluated various cloud service provider options. We chose AWS because it is a leader in the market, offers a wide range of services and is tightly integrated with Kubernetes.

By using AWS and implementing multiple Kubernetes clusters, we have not only improved the resilience of our infrastructure, but also laid the foundation for future growth and innovation. Investing in cloud infrastructure allows us to respond more flexibly to customer needs, ensure scalability and optimise application performance. The decision to move our infrastructure to the cloud and choose AWS as our cloud service provider has been transformative. We are confident that this strategic decision will strengthen our business in the long term and enable us to remain agile and competitive. We will continue to work closely with AWS to continuously optimise our cloud infrastructure and take advantage of the many opportunities that cloud technology offers.

We also relied heavily on Terraform during implementation, a tool that helped us efficiently manage and automate our infrastructure in AWS. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure automation tool developed by HashiCorp that enables the creation, management and updating of infrastructure resources across different cloud platforms and services. It uses the concept of "infrastructure-as-code", where the infrastructure configuration is defined in a declarative language.

With Terraform, developers and DevOps teams can programmatically create and manage infrastructure resources such as virtual machines, networks, storage, containers and more. Terraform provides a unified and consistent approach to infrastructure management, whether in the public cloud (like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) or in a private environment (like VMware, OpenStack).

In summary, the migration of our infrastructure to the cloud, especially to AWS, is a significant improvement for our company. We planned and decided on the project in 2022 and successfully completed it in spring 2023.

With AWS and the implementation of three Kubernetes clusters, we have not only achieved the much-needed resilience. Flexibility and availability have also already been increased and the maintenance effort has decreased significantly in congruence with the growing stability. Scalability and automation are currently in focus and are being expanded as part of a master's thesis.

The fact that we were able to get the most out of the technology for us is certainly also due to the fact that we have already gained some experience in dealing with AWS in large customer projects such as Siemens.

I would like to thank my expert colleagues: Stefan Dobler, Thomas Bojer, Norbert Hoehne and Lorenz Stadler. For me personally, it was a great experience to be part of this agile five-person team.