Online storage management company Box was one of the first companies to build on Kubernetes. Initially creating its platform on PHP, Box’s architecture still uses some parts of the PHP architecture. Today, Box serves as a case study of a software platform’s cloud native journey. The company also continues to rely on its legacy infrastructure dating back to the days when PHP ran on Box’s bare metal servers in its data centers.
In this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Kunal Parmar, director of engineering of Box, discusses the evolution of the cloud content management provider’s cloud native journey with hosts Alex Williams, founder and publisher of The New Stack, Cheryl Hung, vice president of ecosystem at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Ken Owens, vice president, cloud native engineering, Mastercard.
Prior to Box’s adoption of Kubernetes, the company sought ways to “create more services outside of the monolith in order to scale efficiently,” Parmar said. One way to do that, he explained, was to shift its legacy monolith applications into microservices.
“For anybody who has [made the shift to Kubernetes], they would know this is a really long and hard journey. And so, in parallel, we have been focusing on adopting Kubernetes for all of the new microservices that we have been building outside of the monolith,” said Parmar. “And today we are at a point where we’re actually now looking at also starting to migrate the monolith to run on top of Kubernetes so that we can take advantage of the benefits that Kubernetes brings.”
There was another motivating factor behind Box’s shift to Kubernetes what Parmar said might represent an “unpopular opinion.”
“I actually believe that monoliths may never actually go away completely, but they will definitely shrink in size,” he said.
“At some point, the ROI for continuing to break a monolith down for good becomes low enough that it does not make sense to further spend time on the monolith,” Parmar said. “And, therefore, putting the monolith on Kubernetes early on will allow us to reap those benefits for the long term.”
A key issue is deciding when switching from a monolithic application or platform to microservices is worth the investment or not. The determining factor boils down to “really trying to understand the problems that you’re looking to solve.”
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