Fix minor typos in Box Case Study (#5177)

reviewable/pr5189/r2
Malepati Bala Siva Sai Akhil 2017-08-25 05:24:52 +05:30 committed by Steve Perry
parent 751fd12f39
commit 4ca26203b7
1 changed files with 3 additions and 3 deletions

View File

@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ css: /css/style_box.css
<div class="col1">
<h2>Challenge</h2>
Founded in 2005, the enterprise content management company allows its more than 50 million users to manage content in the cloud. <a href="https://www.box.com/home">Box</a> was built primarily with bare metal inside the companys own data centers, with a monolithic PHP code base. As the company was expanding globally, it needed to focus on "how we run our workload across many different cloud infrastructures from bare metal to public cloud," says Sam Ghods, Cofounder and Services Architect of Box. "Its been a huge challenge because different clouds, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces."
Founded in 2005, the enterprise content management company allows its more than 50 million users to manage content in the cloud. <a href="https://www.box.com/home">Box</a> was built primarily with bare metal inside the companys own data centers, with a monolithic PHP code base. As the company was expanding globally, it needed to focus on "how we run our workload across many different cloud infrastructures from bare metal to public cloud," says Sam Ghods, Cofounder and Services Architect of Box. "Its been a huge challenge because of different clouds, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces."
<br>
</div>
@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ css: /css/style_box.css
<div class="fullcol">
<h2>In the summer of 2014, Box was feeling the pain of a decades worth of hardware and software infrastructure that wasnt keeping up with the companys needs.</h2>
A platform that allows its more than 50 million users (including governments and big businesses like <a href="https://www.ge.com/">General Electric</a>) to manage and share content in the cloud, Box was originally a <a href="http://php.net/">PHP</a> monolith of millions of lines of code built exclusively with bare metal inside of its own data centers. It had already begun to slowly chip away at the monolith, decomposing it into microservices. And "as weve been expanding into regions around the globe, and as the public cloud wars have been heating up, weve been focusing a lot more on figuring out how we run our workload across many different environments and many different cloud infrastructure providers," says Box Cofounder and Services Architect Sam Ghods. "Its been a huge challenge thus far because all these different providers, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces and ways in which you work with them."<br><br>
A platform that allows its more than 50 million users (including governments and big businesses like <a href="https://www.ge.com/">General Electric</a>) to manage and share content in the cloud, Box was originally a <a href="http://php.net/">PHP</a> monolith of millions of lines of code built exclusively with bare metal inside of its own data centers. It had already begun to slowly chip away at the monolith, decomposing it into microservices. And "as weve been expanding into regions around the globe, and as the public cloud wars have been heating up, weve been focusing a lot more on figuring out how we run our workload across many different environments and many different cloud infrastructure providers," says Box Cofounder and Services Architect Sam Ghods. "Its been a huge challenge thus far because of all these different providers, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces and ways in which you work with them."<br><br>
Boxs cloud native journey accelerated that June, when Ghods attended <a href="https://www.docker.com/events/dockercon">DockerCon</a>. The company had come to the realization that it could no longer run its applications only off bare metal, and was researching containerizing with Docker, virtualizing with OpenStack, and supporting public cloud.<br><br>
At that conference, Google announced the release of its Kubernetes container management system, and Ghods was won over. "We looked at a lot of different options, but Kubernetes really stood out, especially because of the incredibly strong team of <a href="https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43438.html">Borg</a> veterans and the vision of having a completely infrastructure-agnostic way of being able to run cloud software," he says, referencing Googles internal container orchestrator Borg. "The fact that on day one it was designed to run on bare metal just as well as <a href="https://cloud.google.com/">Google Cloud</a> meant that we could actually migrate to it inside of our data centers, and then use those same tools and concepts to run across public cloud providers as well."<br><br>
Another plus: Ghods liked that <a href="kubernetes.io">Kubernetes</a> has a universal set of API objects like pod, service, replica set and deployment object, which created a consistent surface to build tooling against. "Even PaaS layers like <a href="https://www.openshift.com/">OpenShift</a> or <a href="http://deis.io/">Deis</a> that build on top of Kubernetes still treat those objects as first-class principles," he says. "We were excited about having these abstractions shared across the entire ecosystem, which would result in a lot more momentum than we saw in other potential solutions."<br><br>
@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ css: /css/style_box.css
<section class="section3">
<div class="fullcol">
The first live service, which the team could route to and ask for information, was launched a few months later. At that point, Ghods says, "We were comfortable with the stability of the Kubernetes cluster. We started to port some services over, then we would increase the cluster size and port a few more, and thats ended up to about 100 servers in each data center that are dedicated purely to Kubernetes. And thats going to be expanding a lot over the next 12 months, probably to many hundreds if not thousands."<br><br>
The first live service, which the team could route to and ask for information, was launched a few months later. At that point, Ghods says, "We were comfortable with the stability of the Kubernetes cluster. We started to port some services over, then we would increase the cluster size and port a few more, and thats ended up to about 100 servers in each data center that are dedicated purely to Kubernetes. And thats going to be expanding a lot over the next 12 months, probably too many hundreds if not thousands."<br><br>
While observing teams who began to use Kubernetes for their microservices, "we immediately saw an uptick in the number of microservices being released," Ghods&nbsp;notes. "There was clearly a pent-up demand for a better way of building software through microservices, and the increase in agility helped our developers be more productive and make better architectural choices."
<br><br><div class="quote">"There was clearly a pent-up demand for a better way of building software through microservices, and the increase in agility helped our developers be more productive and make better architectural choices."</div><br>
Ghods reflects that as early adopters, Box had a different journey from what companies experience now. "We were definitely lock step with waiting for certain things to stabilize or features to get released," he says. "In the early days we were doing a lot of contributions [to components such as kubectl apply] and waiting for Kubernetes to release each of them, and then wed upgrade, contribute more, and go back and forth several times. The entire project took about 18 months from our first real deployment on Kubernetes to having general availability. If we did that exact same thing today, it would probably be no more than six."<br><br>