Container orchestration tools to better support e-learning

Educators who face prolonged school closures and the fallout from COVID-19 have shifted rapidly to distance learning. Yet, because students’ learning times are relatively concentrated, high traffic and concurrency ensue during peak hours. To help schools revamp virtual learning on a scale never previously experienced, cloud companies must weather the pandemic stress-test with scalable services.

Containers, which are smaller in capacity than a virtual machine and require less startup time, drive higher server efficiency and faster application deployment. Packaging applications and open-source components within a container allows cloud vendors to help institutions expand compute capacity swiftly and securely with no extra overhead.

Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE) and Tencent Container Registry (TCR), high-performing solutions for Kubernetes container management and container image hosting, help institutions enhance container orchestration and ensure faster delivery of applications to the market.

TKE: managed Kubernetes services, faster build-and-deploy lifecycle

Born out of the open-source Kubernetes system, Tencent Kubernetes Engine (TKE) provides reliable, cost-effective, and easy-to-use container management services. Fully compatible with Kubernetes’ native APIs, TKE has also adapted to Tencent Cloud’s fundamental IaaS capabilities such as CVM and CBS. It supports containerized applications with a complete suite of features, including cluster management, resource scheduling, service discovery, dynamic scaling, environmental consistency, etc. With TKE, the user can simplify the O&M of large-scale clusters, while gaining a Kubernetes native experience and observability into containerized applications.

TCR: accelerated image pulling, continuous delivery, rapid business deployment

Tencent Container Registry (TCR) is a secure and dedicated container image hosting and distribution service. Available in different specifications to meet large-scale pulling requests of clusters, each TCR instance has a dedicated storage backend, and container images and Helm charts are encrypted and stored in COS buckets. The user can purchase TCR instances across regions and synchronize the registry data globally, while pulling container images from the nearest region to reduce data download time and bandwidth cost. In addition, TCR allows the user to enable a continuous delivery pipeline. The user only needs to complete the CI/CD workflow configuration on the DevOps platform, and the source code update will automatically trigger image build and update business applications in container clusters. TCR also features network access control, fine-grained authentication control, and vulnerability scanning to enhance container image security.

TCR has been released on the international console for beta customers.

Tech for good

Containers have transformed the way developers build, ship and maintain applications, while overcoming the operational challenge of rapid scalability. In scenarios such as e-learning, educational tools running on containers boast better availability, scalability, resource utilization, and lower configuration requirements. TKE and TCR, which facilitate container orchestration, further help institutions tap into container-based infrastructure and answer the critical call during COVID-19 pandemic to add more value to online education services.