How Mynewsdesk Cut Infrastructure Costs by 90% with Kubernetes and Talos Linux
Europe
PR & Comms
Talos Linux on Bare Metal 
Founded in 2003, Mynewsdesk is a one-stop solution for PR and communication, with content creation, analysis and insights, and media monitoring. With 150 employees, including 20 developers, they publish around 11,000 stories per month, garnering 6 million page views. They run a monolithic Ruby on Rails application, with React and graphql database.
Challenge
- Unsustainable infrastructure costs
- GDPR compliance
- Lack of in-house Kubernetes experience
Environment
- Hetzner bare metal servers
- 7 servers in staging cluster, 13 in production cluster
- 20 developers
Impact
- 90% decrease in infrastructure costs
- 29% reduction in latency
- 30% reduction in deployment time
- 30% reduction in deployment time
Building Kubernetes Infrastructure with Zero Kubernetes Experience
Mynewsdesk previously outsourced most of their DevOps support to the Heroku platform. As the business scaled, security and development issues began to arise. Their infrastructure fees were unsustainable and they needed to ensure GDPR compliance.
Mynewsdesk investigated EU-cloud providers but found startups in the space lacked proof of reliability and maturity. The team felt these startups could not be trusted for a mission-critical application and they resolved to build an in-house platform running on Kubernetes due to its open source operators, customizability, and popularity.
Their goal was clear, but Mynewsdesk lacked experience in Kubernetes and had concerns about its steep learning curve. They needed a tool that made implementation easy, without requiring years of experience or high costs.
Developer-Friendly Stack Built for Scale with Talos Linux
“With Ubuntu, you ssh in, and you have 150 packages to update. You don’t know what they are, and what will happen when you upgrade, etc. Talos Linux made the updates simple. No package updates to worry about.”
David Backeus, DevOps Technical Lead, Mynewsdesk
Mynewsdesk turned to Hetzner for bare metal hosting with Talos Linux as the operating system. They wanted to abstract and hide Kubernetes from developers, so their team wouldn’t have to learn about Kubernetes, YAML, and other complexities.
Within a few weeks, Mynewsdesk had a functional proof of concept to compare environment performance between the existing Heroku environment and the Hetzner/Talos environment. The results were clear: Latency of 99% of requests dropped from an average of 655 milliseconds to 226ms and throughput increased. The setup using Talos cost 85% less than the Heroku setup.
The team developed their own command line tool to wrap Kubernetes and interface with GitHub, making it easy for developers to manage and update the system. They also leveraged Sidero Labs’ dedicated, highly active Slack community for insights and advice on how to make the most of their infrastructure, ultimately achieving declarative, patchable, and stageable configuration management with Talos.
By bringing data management in-house, Mynewsdesk now has full control of its data and can comply more easily with GDPR regulations.
90% Infrastructure Cost Savings and Zero Downtime Upgrades
“People think doing things like upgrading Kubernetes is super hard. Upgrading Kubernetes using talosctl upgrade-k8s has been a fantastic user experience with zero downtime. So I’m not able to relate to these concerns. We don’t know whether it is a misconception that Kubernetes is hard to self-manage, or whether it is just significantly easier when running Talos Linux.”
David Backeus, DevOps Technical Lead, Mynewsdesk
With Talos Linux, Mynewsdesk’s stack enables developers to do their job without writing or understanding Kubernetes manifests. A team with no prior Kubernetes experience now builds, manages, and optimizes a Kubernetes system with ease.
The new infrastructure significantly improved performance and lowered operating costs. With Kubernetes and Talos Linux, Mynewsdesk has reduced infrastructure costs by 90%, from $200,000 to $20,000. They have also reduced deployment times from five minutes to ten seconds and latency by 29%, a 33 millisecond improvement. By adopting Talos Linux, Mynewsdesk has built a Kubernetes platform that is cost efficient and accessible for the entire development team.
For more details, watch their talk here.
