Tinder’s move to Kubernetes

Almost two years ago, Tinder decided to move its platform to Kubernetes. Kubernetes afforded us an opportunity to drive Tinder Engineering toward containerization and low-touch operation through immutable deployment. Application build, deployment, and infrastructure would be defined as code.

We were also looking to address challenges of scale and stability. When scaling became critical, we often suffered through several minutes of waiting for new EC2 instances to come online. The idea of containers scheduling and serving traffic within seconds as opposed to minutes was appealing to us.

It wasn’t easy. During our migration in early 2019, we reached critical mass within our Kubernetes cluster and began encountering various challenges due to traffic volume, cluster size, and DNS. We solved interesting challenges to migrate 200 services and run a Kubernetes cluster at scale totaling 1,000 nodes, 15,000 pods, and 48,000 running containers.

Starting January 2018, we worked our way through various stages of the migration effort. We started by containerizing all of our services and deploying them to a series of Kubernetes hosted staging environments. Beginning October, we began methodically moving all of our legacy services to Kubernetes.

By March the following year, we finalized our migration and the Tinder Platform now runs exclusively on Kubernetes.

Source: medium.com