What is Cocktail Cloud, and describe its features and advantages.
Cocktail Cloud is a platform built on Kubernetes, offering the functionalities and APIs necessary for building, deploying, monitoring, and operating cloud-native applications from their build phase. The reason why many companies consider adopting Kubernetes is due to the increasing importance of cloud-native applications such as containers, microservices, and serverless architectures.
Cloud-native applications enhance continuity and efficiency in development/operation, ensuring high availability through automation for fault response, load-based scaling, and more. However, the adoption and operation of Kubernetes pose challenges due to the difficulty of adapting to new technologies and the complexity of management, becoming another major challenge for enterprises.
Cocktail Cloud provides an integrated platform with all the functionalities and components required for building and operating Kubernetes and cloud-native applications. Enterprises can save time and effort during initial adoption and seamlessly manage and scale thereafter.
While the number of companies adopting Kubernetes is increasing, there's a significant burden on operating and managing open-source installations, updates, and adapting organizations to new technologies. Additionally, setting up components like monitoring, networking, and security that Kubernetes doesn't inherently provide requires additional effort. Cocktail Cloud offers automated tools for configuring and scaling Kubernetes clusters, simplifying cluster management, including upgrades and node expansion. This leads to reduced efforts in initial setup and ongoing management. Cocktail Cloud extends Kubernetes configurations through addons, providing components like monitoring, networking, GPU support, and security. These addons also come with automated installation/update functionalities.
Enterprises have various reasons for using multi-cluster setups, such as network isolation for security, separate operations for production and development systems, and leveraging public clouds. There's also a growing trend of using multiple clusters and different Kubernetes distributions simultaneously. Cocktail Cloud provides an environment for operating and managing multiple clusters from a single control plane. It supports the construction and management of multi-clusters across diverse infrastructure bases, including private and public clouds, as well as data centers.
Physical Equipment (Baremetal) Based Clusters
Virtualization-Based Private Clouds: OpenStack, VMWare, CTRIX Hypervisor, etc.
Public Clouds: GKE (GCP), EKS (AWS), AKS (Azure), etc.
Enterprises require work environments where clusters and necessary resources are allocated or shared based on the roles of organizations or teams. Particularly in application service development and operation, it's common for dedicated teams to be responsible, and unique computing resources may be required based on the characteristics of applications. Cocktail Cloud provides independent workspaces for organizations or teams, allowing allocation and management of necessary computing resources (clusters). Beyond basic computing resources like CPU, GPU, Memory, Volume, cloud-native applications also require resources for development/operation such as container image registries and automation pipelines. Resource allocation and management, as well as permission management for workspace members, in a multi-tenancy environment can be easily configured and managed within independent workspaces.
Managing multiple clusters and a multi-tenancy environment can be complex and challenging. Cocktail Cloud addresses these issues through various integrated management features. It allows monitoring and managing the status of enterprise-wide applications and infrastructure resources (clusters, repositories). Teams or organizations can track the development/operation status of applications and services and handle resource requests and issues accordingly. Cocktail Cloud centrally monitors multi-cluster infrastructure resources, application statuses, networks, etc., providing real-time alerts/events and logs to effectively respond to faults or issues. Additionally, it offers a customizable integrated monitoring environment tailored to the needs of the enterprise through metric and rule extensions.
Ensuring continuity from application building to deployment and updates has become increasingly crucial. Swiftly responding to customer demands collected through various channels is a key factor in achieving business success. To address this, enterprises establish automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Cloud-native applications offer advanced technologies for building automated pipelines compared to before. Leveraging these advancements, Cocktail Cloud provides various functionalities for establishing and managing automated CI/CD pipelines. Enterprises can tailor pipelines according to the characteristics of their applications and development/operation environments. Additionally, they can provide DevOps platforms for teams or organizations, encompassing operations and monitoring.
Security is a critical management factor for enterprises. Especially, managing authorized user access and permissions to the infrastructure (e.g., clusters in the case of Kubernetes) where applications are deployed and executed is a fundamental approach to address threats from unauthorized users. Cocktail Cloud issues access accounts and permissions to authorized users and manages risks through access periods and revocations. Additionally, it tracks the usage history of access accounts through audit logs, enabling swift responses such as cause analysis and blocking in case of security issues. Furthermore, it provides functionalities such as 'Security Policy Management' for policy formulation and application during container execution, and 'Image Scanning' to inspect vulnerabilities in container images.