Kubernetes can be a choice for Digital Payment and FinTech solutions. This post is mainly about problems Kubernetes can solve for
digital solutions. Using Kubernetes can contribute to better payment transaction success rate.
Kubernetes is getting popular each day and it can be called as a cloud native platform for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It is a production grade container orchestration system. I am calling it as cloud native because all major cloud providers are providing Kubernetes as a service, it can also be deployed as an open source system on top of bare metal machines and virtual machines
Following are some popular Kubernetes as services.
Open Source Kubernetes - Though it is not as a service. It can be used when you want to manage Kubernetes cluster on your own, if you are not sure that you want do this then best for you is to use Kubernetes as a service
Following can be some benefits of using Kubernetes in digital solutions
Optimal Scalability & Reduced Infra Cost - Auto provisioning and de-provisioning of compute resources for application servers facilitates both auto scalability and reduced infra cost. Imagine that your payment gateway is being used for sales of a new phone launched at 11AM and a huge population wants to buy that phone. How would you scale your payment gateway for such kind of unpredictable traffic? Another use case can be performing EOD batch settlements, EOD communications to merchants, EOD batch reports, and processing of batch of transactions coming in files. With Kubernetes you can provision and schedule such work loads and you are not supposed to keep dedicated VMs incurring continuous cost to you
Security - Kubernetes can run on it's own network where services are not directly accessible from outside world. Clusters can can in a VPC, it can facilitate encryption in transit, can facilitate secure configurations, can facilitate SSL termination, and many other security options are possible. Please keep in mind that Kubernetes requires a learning curve and having only very basic understanding about Kubernetes can lead to security loopholes. So don't forget security tests, pear review and other security practices before going live in production. Clear understanding of how Kubernetes works would help lot in keep security intact
Fault Tolerance - A missed payment is a missed business for your merchants/customers, and as a payment service provider you would never want to do. Kubernetes can instantly bring up a crashed service to make the service available. It can run redundant instances of services for fault tolerance and scale. Multi-zonal Kubernetes cluster can further help you achieve DR practices
Auto deployment and no down time - Kubernetes can automate deployment of services and it makes sure that while the deployment is happening the services are not down. It deploys new version of service while service existing traffic on old version and the starts giving load to the new version and then stop giving loads to old version and finally destroys the old version. If a deployment fails or something goes wrong then it can rollback to old version
