After assessing its options, Alcide decided that Google Cloud Platform offered the most stable and secure solution for the company. Google Kubernetes Engine was the core of the new system, providing easy provisioning of new clusters and built-in maintenance tools. Alcide’s developers spent time working on a deployment template that fit their needs. Once that was in place, creating new environments from scratch was quick and simple.

In addition, Alcide used Container Registry to maintain its container images, Cloud Load Balancing to keep its service smooth even with high volumes of traffic, and Stackdriver for logging each one of its clusters. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Identity & Access Management enabled Alcide to simplify its security while streamlining the procedures with granular control of permissions and authentications. By the end of its migration period, Alcide was using Kubernetes Engine for its testing, development, and production environments.

“There are a lot of additional services like logging, monitoring, and security that are baked into the overall service with Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Cloud Platform,” says Gadi. “With Kubernetes Engine in particular, Google is doing a great job in maintaining its performance. It’s the best managed service we found.”

Reduced deployment time for increased productivity
Kubernetes Engine and Google Cloud Platform have enabled Alcide and its security platform to achieve a new level of elasticity by slashing the time taken to deploy new environments. “Provisioning new clusters used to take two to three days,” says Gadi. “With our templates in Kubernetes Engine, we can now do it in 20 minutes.” This has helped Alcide scale its platform to accommodate large enterprise stacks with thousands of nodes and hundreds of thousands of workloads.

Meanwhile, Google’s managed services made maintaining and updating clusters much easier for Alcide. With much of the DevOps burden lifted, engineers could now work on more important business objectives.

“For a startup like ours, we want to move fast, close the gaps with our customers and provide as much feature functionality as we can,” says Gadi. “Google Cloud Platform lets us concentrate on writing our own business logic and implementing the application, without having to worry about the infrastructure.”

Always evolving, always improving

As Alcide grows its business and works on new features, it continues to explore new ways of making GCP and Kubernetes even more efficient. The company is currently looking at the option of preemptible virtual machines in Kubernetes Engine to reduce costs while new features in Container Registry allow for built-in image scanning for vulnerabilities. “It’s something we’ve recently started to explore, and it helps us deliver a much more secure workload in the design period,” says Gadi. “We’re very happy with Google Cloud Platform, both with where we’re at now and where we’re headed.”