Companies are starting to adopt blockchain due to its various uses such as: transferring crypto, information (specially in insurance companies), agroblockchain, or buying and selling NFTs. Kubernetes (or K8s) can help businesses use blockchain for its simplified deployments of pods and containers, interoperability between machines, cloud ecosystems, upgradability of information and processes in a network.
How can Kubernetes be used in a blockchain application?
The developer’s experience continues to be a key part when building and after releasing a blockchain. Once it is built, deploying and managing the blockchain becomes simple and intuitive.
In business operations, being cloud agnostic allows all parties that are involved in a service or product to access the same information stored in a blockchain without revealing private and internal data. For its distributive performance and pod deployments, Kubernetes can configure, deploy and manage a company’s private blockchain in a less manual way whilst supplying the necessary components to keep the network safe, scalable and fail-safe.
Kubernetes does help deploy blockchains, however there are few elements that developers must manually configure, which are: choosing a protocol image and other components, creating YAML manifests and Helm charts, using helm-install for testing the blockchain technology in Kubernetes clusters before release.
For the successful implementation of Kubernetes in a blockchain service, organizations are highly recommended to set up the following roles:
Consequently, Microsoft and Docker have been able to apply most of their functionality in blockchains, while IBM has inserted the use of containers in their protocols.
Use case #1: Docker
Using Docker in a blockchain makes sure that each blockchain node is functional and running without having to configure each virtual machine. The Docker Hub provides Hyperledger, Ethereum and Quorum images as starting points to configure the blockchain network with a secure scalability but without much effort.
When setting up a blockchain network, using Docker saves time, effort and money by allowing a quicker delivery and release of software, in addition to carrying out cloud and blockchain consistency.
Use case #2: IBM Cloud
IBM created their Blockchain Platform, which helps companies to deploy their blockchains in any cloud ecosystem, whether it is on IBM’s clouds or with another cloud service provider, managing all the blockchain nodes from only a single dashboard and simplifying deployment mechanism.
Furthermore, the use of IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services and its existing administrative tech helps developers to effortlessly scale the ecosystems that are used in a blockchain, while making sure that various containers run at the same time.
With the IBM Blockchain Platform, businesses have flexibility in choosing where and how to deploy the development, testing, and production environments, which accelerates the blockchain’s release cycle.
Use case #3: Microsoft and Helm
Helm is a package manager that helps you find, share, and use software that is built for Kubernetes. It was originally created by Deis (now part of Microsoft) and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Helm charts, Kubernetes’ package manager, offers a higher-level construct that helps the user create, upgrade and rollback entire applications without the hassle of administrating each Kubernetes resources individually (services, deployments, etc.).
Like any other Kubernetes Managed services, Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) also allows users to customize virtual machines and number of nodes to make blockchain fail-safe by using Hyperledger Fabric (an open source blockchain framework).
How is Cuemby using K8s in blockchain tech?
In conclusion, because creating, deploying and managing a blockchain based software application can be manually challenging at first, Kubernetes is the best system to implement a blockchain smoothly in your business operations without much hassle later on.
Cuemby offers a Kubernetes solution for blockchain applications: Cuemby Cloud Platform. It is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to effortlessly provision, manage, and scale cloud infrastructure without the hassle of investing time and resources into developing any of the underlying competencies such as engineering, automation, performance, and security.