Lucidworks Kubernetes Service (Accelerate Fusion 5 Adoption for Self-Hosted Enterprises)

Presented at virtual Activate 2020. Lucidworks Fusion 5 brings the advantages of a portable, scalable, cloud-native search engine to enterprises. Fusion 5 can be deployed as self-hosted or managed on Lucidworks Cloud. For self-hosted deployments, the need for operating a container-based application can be addressed in different ways. If enterprises do not have this expertise in house, Lucidworks is offering the Lucidworks Kubernetes Service that offloads the operational burden and allows enterprises to focus primarily on optimizing the business outcomes for search.

Speaker:
Radu Miclaus, Director of Product, AI and Cloud Services, Lucidworks

Intended Audience:
Operational and Business owners of search applications within enterprises.

Attendee Takeaway:
Lucidworks Kubernetes Service offloads the operational burden of running Fusion as a Kubernetes Application in your data centers or your public cloud instances.

Transcript

Radu: Welcome everyone. Welcome to Activate. My name is Radu Miclaus. I’m a director of product for AI and cloud services at Lucidworks.

This session is about the Lucidworks, Kubernetes service and how you can accelerate Fusion 5 adoption for self hosted enterprises.

Before we jump in, there’s three areas that we’re going to touch on during the presentation. One of the big ones, obviously throughout the conference, which is one of the themes for us is: why upgrade to Fusion 5? Also, we’ll talk a little bit about the ways to deploy Fusion 5. Then we’ll talk a little bit about the details of the Lucidworks Kubernetes service.

For us Fusion 5 has been a journey that has been driven by innovation by our customers. In many ways they continuously have been asking us for reduced time to value accessing new solutions and also maximizing data science. In terms of reducing time to value, there’s a whole area of focus around how we can actually get our applications up and running faster? How do we manage them and how do we drive value from them in a shorter time span?

For that, we’ve been able to adapt very robust cloud native architecture for Fusion 5 as compared to Fusion 4 that brings tremendous capabilities to bear.

Accessing new solutions. Since last year, when we announced Fusion 5, we’ve added a lot of AI capabilities and domain specific capabilities that you will see throughout the conference. They are very exciting and only available in Fusion 5. Maximizing data science, how can we make the platform more accessible and more pluggable, by data science teams that would like to influence and add more value from a data science perspective to the search experience?

Why Upgrade to Fusion 5? We’ll spend a little bit of time talking specifically about the cloud native architecture advantages and the type of things that we can expect by moving to a cloud native architecture with Fusion 5.

First and foremost, flexible deployments. Anywhere where containers can run, Fusion 5 deploy. It is called native architecture that is easy to scale and easy to run day two operations on.

You also can talk about application resilience. For many of you, search is a mission critical application, whether it’s on your eCommerce site or on your internet in your workplace environment.

As a number of application queries, data sources are increasing that the engine needs to scale with that environment. This is where application resilience comes in by being architected in a cloud native fashion. DevOps friendly, our personas and our drivers in the operation sites in our customer sites, are definitely excited about starting to integrate more of the practices that Fusion is using now for CI/CD continuous integration and deployment into their operations.

Now the platform is able to fully integrate into those DevOps practices accordingly.

Finally, global support, the supporting operations across the globe is very important for us and that’s been a staple of the fusion platform for a long time now. This is where customers are driving a lot of value out of having a resilient scalable enterprise supportable platform.

Let’s talk about Fusion, two types of deployments with Fusion 5. We have self-hosting, which is a deployment on containerized solutions like Kubernetes on public private hybrid cloud environments. It is microservices based and it integrates in depth with DevOps like we mentioned.

It allows you to actually keep the application up and running and update your services individually. It can also be managed where if you are lacking the ability to run Fusion on premise or self hosted, we on the Lucidworks side, can host the whole application for you. It is professionally managed by experts at Lucidworks.

We can help with code promotions. Obviously we have SLAs around uptime and speed and throughput and also 24/7, 365 support. If we were to drill into the self hosted side, we’re seeing two different scenarios in our customers currently: the customers that have been planning and ramping up their Kubernetes knowledge, and the customers that are just starting on that journey.

On the left hand side, you have enterprises that have deep knowledge on how to run scale and maintain Kubernetes based applications and architectures and they can very easily switch the support model of Bare OS or VMs to containers. And for that, the learning curve is pretty flat, and we’re adding a lot of very good documentation for those types of operational teams that know how to run Kubernetes and are very comfortable just consuming the way Fusion is deployed on Kubernetes via what we call our survival guides and they’re shared through Lucidworks documentation.

On the other side, the right hand side, we have companies that are interested in modernizing their architecture, but yet do not have operational support for Kubernetes, either a plan in the short term or the midterm. They are however open to offloading the infrastructure and operational burden completely, easy way to manage an application with a flat learning curve and for that, we have Lucidworks Kubernetes service.

We’ll spend the remainder of this presentation talking about this particular service. The Lucidworks Kubernetes service is a software as a service managed cloud, with fully automated Day 2 operations and very robust SLAs around distributed Kubernetes clusters anywhere. On-prem on Bare OS or VMs or public cloud environments and even edge locations.

This is made possible by our partnership with a company called Platform9, that is providing this type of technology for us. This particular software as a service component that allows you to manage infrastructure in all these environments is accessible through a control point, which we’re going to touch base in a little bit and also APIs.

It makes it very convenient, both for a low code type experience, but also for API developers.

How does this work? Platform9 has a control plane that allows it to interact with on-prem architecture like Bare Metal, VMware and OpenStack and also public cloud environments like AWS, GCP and Azure. It allows it to manage that infrastructure through the control plane very easily. A little bit more detailed view, is the way the facility is able to do that is by deploying agents on the infrastructure and communicating to the agents with the control plane. It is a very straightforward, single pane of glass that allows you to deploy and manage Kubernetes anywhere, whether just to repeat it, whether it’s on your Bare OS or VMs or on our public cloud instances and computers.

To give you the gist of Lucidworks Kubernetes service user experience, obviously log-in screens are fully integrated with your security layers. Then as you walk in the dashboard, you are greeted with a health check and a health status of all your services. Your servers, your storage, your network, your regions and then you can start navigating throughout the control plane very easily by checking out infrastructure, your app catalogs, the deployments and services in your pods, any type of storage configurations, namespaces, user experience, et cetera.

A couple more snapshots here for pod management or deployments or services, status or managing roles, users, role bindings, cluster role bindings, et cetera. It’s very straightforward. This is a very easy learning curve for system admins that have been using these types of facilities, these types of controlling facilities for a while now.

In closing. If you’re interested in Fusion 5 features, if you need to self-host the infrastructure and the data, and you do not have support for Kubernetes operations in the short or medium term, please ask us about the Lucidworks Kubernetes Service.

We’ll be happy to answer your questions.

Enjoy Activate and have a great rest of the day. Thank you.