Automating Migrations Between Lagoon Clusters, and Embracing Managed Kubernetes

Update July 2020

In our ongoing effort to increase transparency and communication, we are beginning to document more about our infrastructure setup and configuration. We realize there are many Managed Kubernetes providers (the list in the CNCF Certified Hosted Kubernetes Landscape is ever-growing), so we will endeavor to outline how we evaluate a platform for use with Lagoon. The majority of our decision-making process here is customer/partner-driven, but we also use a number of criteria to evaluate the services offered by different providers. We’d like you to understand why these criteria are important to us and what they mean.

We have started a discussion page in our GitHub repository to capture our thinking and any comments/discussion.

Head on over to https://github.com/amazeeio/lagoon/discussions/2035 to watch it unfold!

In our recent blog post, Michael outlined why amazee.io is working so hard to make Lagoon work in managed Kubernetes. The benefits of better autoscaling and reduced maintenance are obviously the headline grabbers, but today, we want to discuss one of the most important benefits for amazee.io and our customers: portability.

The team has been hard at work with a number of managed Kubernetes providers, already deploying sites to AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in three regions and to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in three more, as well as building a relationship with Catalyst Cloud in New Zealand.  Ensuring that we are familiar with the products, processes, and nuances of the various providers is essential to our success.

The widening of the infrastructure choice has helped us reduce a major barrier to entry for our customers - they can utilize existing hosting relationships (billing, accounts, permissions, etc) to bring their sites to Lagoon.  The other opportunity this realizes is the ability to host your sites “closer to home.” Where previously Lagoon was mostly limited to the large amazee.io clusters in the three main regions, you now have a wide range of EKS, AKS, and GKE (Google Cloud) locations available, so you’ll be spoilt for choice!

We’ve developed a process that can handle not only OpenShift-to-Kubernetes migrations but also migrations between different Kubernetes clusters (even across different providers and regions!). Above all, amazee.io can manage the migration for you, with no downtime and no need to retool your development environments!

We will be reaching out to all our existing customers to schedule a switch over the coming months, but if you have specific requirements or timeframes, please let us know.  When it’s time to go, we will migrate all your environments from one cluster to the other, give you a dedicated URL to test your sites on the new cluster, and, when all looks good, perform one last sync and switch the DNS. Migrations in a breeze!

With the ability to migrate projects between a customer’s Kubernetes clusters as they deploy more sites, we can now work closely with them to find the optimal cluster architecture, considering node and pod counts, anticipated workloads, and traffic patterns.  Individual clusters could be provisioned for segregated workloads, for development environments, or configured for occasional on-demand use, so the ability to “move” projects and sites between them will be hugely useful for optimizing performance and cost.

If you’re interested in hearing more about our Kubernetes offering, check out our infographic.