From 4ca26203b72b06a06af87c21a344320b687d73df Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Malepati Bala Siva Sai Akhil Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 05:24:52 +0530 Subject: [PATCH] Fix minor typos in Box Case Study (#5177) --- case-studies/box.html | 6 +++--- 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/case-studies/box.html b/case-studies/box.html index ea43909bfc..468a7b2e4a 100644 --- a/case-studies/box.html +++ b/case-studies/box.html @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ css: /css/style_box.css

Challenge

- Founded in 2005, the enterprise content management company allows its more than 50 million users to manage content in the cloud. Box was built primarily with bare metal inside the company’s 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. "It’s 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. Box was built primarily with bare metal inside the company’s 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. "It’s been a huge challenge because of different clouds, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces."
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ css: /css/style_box.css

In the summer of 2014, Box was feeling the pain of a decade’s worth of hardware and software infrastructure that wasn’t keeping up with the company’s needs.

- A platform that allows its more than 50 million users (including governments and big businesses like General Electric) to manage and share content in the cloud, Box was originally a PHP 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 we’ve been expanding into regions around the globe, and as the public cloud wars have been heating up, we’ve 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. "It’s 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."

+ A platform that allows its more than 50 million users (including governments and big businesses like General Electric) to manage and share content in the cloud, Box was originally a PHP 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 we’ve been expanding into regions around the globe, and as the public cloud wars have been heating up, we’ve 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. "It’s 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."

Box’s cloud native journey accelerated that June, when Ghods attended DockerCon. 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.

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 Borg veterans and the vision of having a completely infrastructure-agnostic way of being able to run cloud software," he says, referencing Google’s internal container orchestrator Borg. "The fact that on day one it was designed to run on bare metal just as well as Google Cloud 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."

Another plus: Ghods liked that Kubernetes 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 OpenShift or Deis 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."

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- 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 that’s ended up to about 100 servers in each data center that are dedicated purely to Kubernetes. And that’s going to be expanding a lot over the next 12 months, probably to many hundreds if not thousands."

+ 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 that’s ended up to about 100 servers in each data center that are dedicated purely to Kubernetes. And that’s going to be expanding a lot over the next 12 months, probably too many hundreds if not thousands."

While observing teams who began to use Kubernetes for their microservices, "we immediately saw an uptick in the number of microservices being released," Ghods 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."

"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."

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 we’d 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."