Container Platforms as Equalizers: Running Health Services Across the World

Praekelt.org creates and operates a number of health and youth-related services which are hosted on containerised clusters around the world, often in countries without an established cloud provider pr …

Praekelt.org creates and operates a number of health and youth-related services which are hosted on containerised clusters around the world, often in countries without an established cloud provider presence. This means that the infrastructure reliability and tooling that may typically be available are not. In addition, as a small team managing clusters in several isolated datacenters around the world, achieving commonality is challenging. While we started using container orchestration because we wanted to increase resource utilisation and deployment agility, we have found the real value has been in our ability to abstract many of the differences between clusters. Now, as we move towards Kubernetes, we will share lessons for shifting developers between different container orchestrators as seamlessly as possible by using Spinnaker as a common continuous deployment tool.