Cloud Native Infrastructure

Appendix C. Box: Case Study

Note

The following was originally published on Kubernetes.io by the CNCF and is used here with permission.

In the summer of 2014, Box was feeling the pain of a decade’s worth of hardware and software infrastructure that wasn’t keeping up with the company’s needs.

A platform that allows its more than 50 million users (including governments and big businesses like General Electric) to manage and share content in the cloud, Box was originally a PHP monolith of millions of lines of code built with bare metal inside of its own data centers. It had already begun to slowly chip away at the monolith, decomposing it into microservices. “And as we were expanding into regions around the globe, the public cloud wars were heating up and we started to focus on how to run our workload across many different environments and many different cloud infrastructure providers,” says Box cofounder and services architect Sam Ghods. “It’s been a huge challenge thus far because all these different providers, especially bare metal, have very different interfaces and ways in which you work with them.”

Box’s cloud native journey accelerated that June, when Ghods attended DockerCon. The company had come to the realization that it could no longer run its applications only off bare metal, and was researching containerizing with Docker, virtualizing with OpenStack, and supporting public cloud.

At that conference, Google announced the release of its Kubernetes container management system, ...