Spotify: An Early Adopter of Containers, Spotify Is Migrating from Homegrown Orchestration to Kubernetes

Before directly jump to the case study, let’s see What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The open-source project is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

CHALLENGE

Launched in 2008, the audio-streaming platform has grown to over 200 million monthly active users across the world.

“Our goal is to empower creators and enable a really immersive listening experience for all of the consumers that we have today — and hopefully the consumers we’ll have in the future,” says Jai Chakrabarti, Director of Engineering, Infrastructure, and Operations.

An early adopter of microservices and Docker, Spotify had containerized microservices running across its fleet of VMs with a homegrown container orchestration system called Helios. By late 2017, it became clear that “having a small team working on the features was just not as efficient as adopting something that was supported by a much bigger community,” he says.

SOLUTION

“We saw the amazing community that had grown up around Kubernetes, and we wanted to be part of that,” says Chakrabarti.

Kubernetes was more feature-rich than Helios. Plus, “we wanted to benefit from added velocity and reduced cost, and also align with the rest of the industry on best practices and tools.” At the same time, the team wanted to contribute its expertise and influence to the flourishing Kubernetes community. The migration, which would happen in parallel with Helios running, could go smoothly because “Kubernetes fit very nicely as a compliment and now as a replacement to Helios,” says Chakrabarti.

IMPACT

The team spent much of 2018 addressing the core technology issues required for a migration, which started late that year and is a big focus for 2019.

“A small percentage of our fleet has been migrated to Kubernetes, and some of the things that we’ve heard from our internal teams are that they have less of a need to focus on manual capacity provisioning and more time to focus on delivering features for Spotify,” says Chakrabarti.

The biggest service currently running on Kubernetes takes about 10 million requests per second as an aggregate service and benefits greatly from autoscaling, says Site Reliability Engineer James Wen. Plus, he adds, “Before, teams would have to wait for an hour to create a new service and get an operational host to run it in production, but with Kubernetes, they can do that on the order of seconds and minutes.” In addition, with Kubernetes’s bin-packing and multi-tenancy capabilities, CPU utilization has improved on average two- to threefold.

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