Unlocking Cloud‑Native Success: Real‑World Kubernetes Practices from UCloud Experts

Containers, Kubernetes, and cloud‑native technologies are increasingly favored by enterprises, with Kubernetes becoming the standard for large‑scale containerized application deployment. As Kubernetes evolves rapidly, companies face complex challenges in real‑world deployments, prompting a focus on overcoming technical hurdles.

On August 17, the UCan afternoon tea Shanghai event titled "Cloud‑Native Kubernetes Development and Operations" gathered six senior technical experts to discuss practical K8S implementations.

Zhang Miao‑lei: Kubernetes Clusters on Cloud Platforms

K8S, launched in 2014, serves as a container orchestration platform, allowing users to focus on container contents while delegating scheduling and runtime to K8S. UCloud’s public‑cloud offering, UK8S, extends general functionality with additional capabilities.

Network: Leveraging the cloud provider’s underlying network, UK8S offers SecondIP to integrate with other cloud products, avoiding performance loss from packet encapsulation.

Service Access: Users can create a LoadBalancer‑type Service inside the cluster, which automatically links to UCloud’s ULB product, supporting non‑SNAT load balancers for direct source IP access.

Storage: While native K8S requires administrators or third parties to provision PersistentVolumes, UK8S integrates UCloud block and file storage. Creating a PVC with a predefined StorageClass automatically provisions the corresponding PV on UDisk/UFS.

Zhang Pengbo: Building a Stable and Easy‑to‑Use UK8S Service

K8S uses namespaces for weak tenant isolation, but UK8S, launched in 2018, requires strong tenant isolation. UK8S ensures exclusive resources for each user, including isolated VPC networks, compute resources (UHost), nodes, masters, and storage plugins.

Usability enhancements include one‑click cluster creation/deletion, automatic scaling, API Service external access, and cross‑AZ robustness. The high‑availability architecture is illustrated below.

UK8S also integrates with UCloud’s bare‑metal “Jinwing” servers, offering competitive TCO for physical machine leasing and pre‑installed K8S services, with storage and load balancing ready. UK8S plans to expand to over 30 AZs and introduce a new app store.

Wei Feilong (Le Xin Medical): Kubernetes in Le Xin Health

Le Xin’s wearable product backend has run on K8S since 2016, initially on a self‑built cluster. Challenges included running the same image across dev, test, and prod environments and manual binary installations. The team adopted kubeadm for rapid setup and resolved image pull issues by adjusting registry URLs.

Migration to UK8S eliminated component maintenance, simplifying network and storage management. The speaker also highlighted using Apollo for configuration, reducing startup time, and Jenkins pipelines for parallel releases, halting the entire process on any failure.

Liu Tuo: K8S in the StepFlow Project

StepFlow is a workflow engine that orchestrates microservice APIs without writing code. Its microservice‑centric design naturally led to containerization, but the team faced challenges in resource planning, high‑availability, and service interconnection.

UCloud’s internal K8S platform KUN ("Kun") addressed these issues, providing high availability across zones, transparent resource management, service connectivity via configured services, and integrated configuration, logging, and monitoring capabilities. Leveraging CNCF components, KUN boosted productivity, enabling rapid CI/CD pipelines and one‑click deployments.

Cai Shu: Service Mesh Solution Based on Kong

Kong, a popular API gateway, offers intelligent, easy‑to‑use integration with microservices, dynamic routing, fine‑grained analytics, and a rich plugin ecosystem. It supports containerized deployment and provides high throughput with low latency.

Typical use cases include traffic entry, microservice visualization, black/gray traffic filtering, and service registration integration. Technically, Kong builds on Nginx and OpenResty, with clustering for real‑time configuration updates, exposing RESTful APIs for programmatic control.

Wang Haifeng (Yuan Year Technology): K8S Adoption for Small Teams

K8S complexity demands clear simplification for limited‑resource teams. Key considerations include identifying essential services, designing simple external programs, ensuring consistent dev/test environments, and standardizing K8S interfaces.

In practice, the team used Windows servers for credential features, Jenkins for DevOps triggers, Rancher on three physical machines for offline environments, and UCloud’s image repository with UK8S for online deployment, reducing operational overhead. Communication between clusters employed RESTful APIs via curl for deployment and deletion actions.

For more technical details, follow the "UCloud Technology" public account and reply with "K8S" to receive the speakers' PPTs.