Scalability within the virtual cloud environment is a big topic for developers at the popular car ride-sharing service Lyft Inc. In fact, the company developed and deployed open-source proxy Envoy in September 2016 — a technology donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Its next step is to enhance the infrastructure layers and communications for the company’s microservice-based applications.

“As we integrate technology with Istio and Kubernetes and all the different related technologies, we are trying to get rid of our bespoke stuff that many companies like Lyft had, and try to get on that general train,” said Matt Klein (pictured), software engineer at Lyft.

Klein spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas. (* Disclosure below.)

Writing business logic

The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference is becoming the most applicable conference for Lyft, according to Klein. “I think we are in a unique time right now,” he said. “­I think if you look out 10 years from now and look at some of the services coming online — like Amazon just did Fargate, the whole container scheduling system, Azure has one, Google has one — in 10 years’ time, people are going to be writing business logic.”

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications that was originally designed by Google and donated to the CNCF in 2016. Lyft runs in AWS with Envoy as its service mesh but without using containers in production. Now that’s changing.

Because Kubernetes is an open-source tech that helps cloud providers enable their infrastructure as a service, it’s on the rise in the developer community, Klein pointed out. In fact, the application container market is on the verge of taking off, with one analyst firm predicting it will grow to $2.7 billion by 2020, according to the “Market Monitor: Cloud-Enabling Technologies” report.

The biggest challenge is that there are too many people editing on the same code base and face micro service problems, according to Klein. About three years ago, Lyft started its microservice architecture journey, a variant of service-oriented architecture, which allows for developers to write different languages. But there have been challenges.

“We have these problems where people want to build in five or six languages, they have some common problems around load balancing and other types of things, and this is a great solution for offloading some of those problems into a common place,” Klein said.

Lyft is now working on service mesh architecture to manage its service communication needs.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE