Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2021

How to Maximize the Performance of Your Kubernetes Deployment

With Kubernetes emerging as a strong choice for container orchestration for many organizations, monitoring in Kubernetes environments is essential to application performance. Poor application/infrastructure performance impact in the era of cloud computing, as-a-service delivery models is more significant than ever. How many of us today have more than two rideshare apps or more than three food delivery apps?

GitOps with Argo and Crossplane - Civo Online Meetup #10

Join Viktor Farcic and Anais Urlichs in this meetup as we will explore Crossplane through the Civo Crossplane Provider. We will showcase how to create Civo Kubernetes clusters through the Civo Crossplane Provider, we will look at GitOps best practices to manage all of your resources in Kubernetes, and lastly we will provide an overview on how you can take GitOps deployments to the next level with ArgoCD.

Kubernetes 1.22 - What's new?

This release brings 56 enhancements, an increase from 50 in Kubernetes 1.21 and 43 in Kubernetes 1.20. Of those 56 enhancements, 13 are graduating to Stable, a whopping 24 are existing features that keep improving, and 16 are completely new. It’s great to see so many new features focusing on security, like the replacement for the Pod Security Policies, a rootless mode, and enabling Seccomp by default. Also, watch out for all the deprecations and removals in this version!

A Sneak Peek at the "Calico Certified Operator: AWS Expert" Course

Recently, we released our new “Calico Certified Operator: AWS Expert” course. You can read more about why we created this course and how it can benefit your organization in the introductory blog post. This blog post is different; it’s an opportunity for you, the potential learner, to get a glimpse of just a few interesting parts of the course. You won’t learn all the answers here, but you’ll learn some of the questions!

Unlocking New Possibilities with CloudHedge and IBM Edge Computing

Edge computing is gaining huge momentum lately, and with the onset of 5G, the opportunities are endless. Moreover, it ensures or brings computation and data storage closer to where the data is generated, further enables better control, reduces costs, provides faster and actionable insights, and supports continuous operations. In fact, by 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge, compared to only 10% today, as predicted by Gartner.

Quick Kubeflow Pipelines with KALE, ElasticSearch and Ceph

KALE allows you to annotate your Jupiter notebooks on Kubeflow and magically compile and run Kubeflow Pipelines. In this demo, Aymen Frikha from Canonical shows how to deploy and run Kubeflow alongside ElasticSearch and Ceph, and how to quickly run a pipeline directly from a Jupyter notebook, using KALE (Kubeflow Automated pipeLines Engine).

What is the MITRE ATT&CK Framework for Cloud? | 10 TTPs You should know of

In any case, by using the MITRE ATT&CK framework to model and implement your cloud IaaS security, you will have a head start on any compliance standard since it guides your cybersecurity and risk teams to follow the best security practices. As it does for all platforms and environments, MITRE came up with an IaaS Matrix to map the specific Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) that advanced threat actors could possibly use in their attacks on Cloud environments.

How to mitigate CVE-2021-33909 Sequoia with Falco - Linux filesystem privilege escalation vulnerability

The CVE-2021-33909, named Sequoia, is a new privilege escalation vulnerability that affects Linux’s file system. It was disclosed in July, 2021, and it was introduced in 2014 on many Linux distros; among which we have Ubuntu (20.04, 20.10 and 21.04), Debian 11, Fedora 34 Workstation and some Red Hat products, too. This vulnerability is caused by an out-of-bounds write found in the Linux kernel’s seq_file in the Filesystem layer.

Monitoring Kubernetes the Elastic way using Filebeat and Metricbeat

In my previous blog post, I demonstrated how to use Prometheus and Fluentd with the Elastic Stack to monitor Kubernetes. That’s a good option if you’re already using those open source-based monitoring tools in your organization. But, if you’re new to Kubernetes monitoring, or want to take full advantage of Elastic Observability, there is an easier and more comprehensive way. In this blog, we will explore how to monitor Kubernetes the Elastic way: using Filebeat and Metricbeat.

What's new in Sysdig - July 2021

Welcome to another monthly update on what’s new from Sysdig! Happy 4th of July to our American audience, and bonne Bastille to our French friends. It’s been heating up in the northern hemisphere, so we hope you’ve all been managing to stay cool and safe. Our team continues to work hard to bring great new features to all of our customers, automatically and for free! The big news this month is our intent to acquire Apolicy, which has everyone full of excitement.

Getting Started with kapp

In this video Tiffany Jernigan (twitter.com/tiffanyfayj) talks about the Carvel toolset tool, kapp. kapp (part of the open source Carvel suite) is a lightweight application-centric tool for deploying resources on Kubernetes. Being both explicit and application-centric it provides an easier way to deploy and view all resources created together regardless of what namespace they’re in. Being dependency-aware, it is able to wait for resources to be created, updated, or deleted, and provides a live status on the progress of the actions. Continue on to see how to get started with kapp.

Tanzu Tuesdays 62 - Monitoring Avail. w/Error Budget Burn Rate on Tanzu Observability w/Amber Salome

Starting in April of 2020 my team was tasked with managing Tanzu Application Service on multiple foundations for a client. Early on it was a priority to establish a strong SRE practice around managing the platform. This talk discusses how we defined key metrics for monitoring availability, custom solutions for populating availability data into an observability platform (Tanzu Observability by Wavefront), dashboard creating, and alerting practices. We discuss in depth the benefits of using a burn rate when monitoring availability error budget consumption, and how this strategy allows for more sensitive alerting and limiting error budget consumption.

Do you really need a service mesh?

The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer. While a service mesh is intended to help developers and SREs with a number of use cases related to service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters, a service mesh also adds operational complexity and introduces an additional control plane for security teams to manage.

Accelerating Machine Learning with MLOps and FuseML: Part One

Building successful machine learning (ML) production systems requires a specialized re-interpretation of the traditional DevOps culture and methodologies. MLOps, short for machine learning operations, is a relatively new engineering discipline and a set of practices meant to improve the collaboration and communication between the various roles and teams that together manage the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning projects.

Microservices Are 'Easy', Dependencies Are Hard - Itiel Shwartz (at Yalla DevOps 2021)

Yalla! DevOps 2021 -- The first, in-person DevOps conference of the year! Driven by the DevOps community. All about the DevOps community. Microservices Are ‘Easy’, Dependencies Are Hard: The Right Way to Build a Cloud-Native CI/CD Microservices are more agile, easier to test, and simpler to maintain. If you don’t know, now you know. Thanks to k8s, it’s so easy! In fact, it is so easy, we’re gradually scaling down to smaller and smaller services. Sounds like there’s no downside at all. Or is there? In this talk, Itiel describes the many pitfalls of microservices, and how to avoid them.

High-availability connectivity for Kubernetes with dual ToR

Dual ToR (top of rack) peering provides a redundant path for customers with cluster applications that cannot tolerate service downtime or failure and require a high-availability solution. While Calico ToR connectivity has existed for some time, Calico Enterprise now supports connectivity with dual ToR switches.

Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu Is Now GA, Plus an Integration with TriggerMesh

Back in March, during our Cloud Transformation event, we released the public beta of Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu, which is based on Knative serving and eventing technology. Today, we have a couple of new, exciting announcements to make about Cloud Native Runtimes.

How to Instrument a Java App Running in Amazon EKS

As we start to see big moves from monolith deployments to microservices, the adoption of Kubernetes has become top of mind for many SREs. Organizations can leverage the open-source system to automate deployments, scale, and manage containers, making Kubernetes one of the primary solutions for delivering workloads. However, maintaining the system can be difficult and, in some cases, overwhelming.

How to test the latest Kubernetes 1.22 release candidate with MicroK8s

Today, the Kubernetes community made the 1.22 release candidate available, a few weeks ahead of general availability, planned for August the 4th. We invite developers, platform engineers and cloud tech enthusiasts to experiment with the new features, report back findings and bugs. MicroK8s is the easiest way to get up and running with the latest version of K8s for testing and experimentation.

Sysdig and Apolicy join forces to help customers secure Infrastructure As Code and automate remediation

Today, we announced that Sysdig is acquiring Apolicy to enable our customers to secure their infrastructure as code. I could not be more excited because the innovation that Apolicy brings to bear is unique and highly differentiated, allowing customers to strengthen their Kubernetes and cloud security and compliance by leveraging policy as code and automated remediation workflows that close the gap from source to production.

Migrating Thousands of Cloud Instances to New Kubernetes Custom Resources

Mattermost’s Kubernetes Operator spins up and manages Mattermost instances running on Kubernetes based on a ClusterInstallation Custom Resource (CR). Mattermost Operator 1.0 has evolved a lot since its release, along with the ClusterInstallation CR in the v1alpha version. As time went by — as with any software — the Operator gained more features, configuration options, functionalities, and technical debt.

LaunchDarkly Integration: Feature Flag Aware Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting is the understanding of changes within the system and their impact on its health, behavior, and functionality. However, as dev environments grow exponentially more complex, the definition of “the system” itself also constantly expands. To keep pace, we constantly work to evolve Komodor’s platform and enrich it with new capabilities and integrational options.

GitOps meets AppOps

Kubernetes allowed us to manage application deployments and infrastructure components using declarative configuration files (yes, those YAMLs that you may not be a fan of ). While dealing with a myriad of YAML files may be loved by some and hated by others, it enables us to host all these files into a Git repository, hook it up to a pipeline (Jenkins, GitLab, etc.), and have a tool apply those changes to a cluster—and voilà, you have GitOps.

KUBLR | Enterprise-Grade Kubernetes Management Platform

Kublr is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes management platform. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. and launched in 2016, Kublr automates the deployment and management of production-ready, secure Kubernetes clusters and environments. Kublr allows users to securely and reliably deploy, run, and manage containerized applications at scale. A subsidiary of EastBanc Technologies, Kublr is a proud contributor to the Kubernetes codebase, an active member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and completed the CNCF Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program.

Deploy your apps on Scaleway with Qovery! Get early access now

When we launched Qovery in January 2020, our product was only supporting app deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 20 months later, 5534 developers from more than 120 countries use Qovery to deploy their apps on AWS and Digital Ocean. Today, more and more European companies would love to benefits from the excellent user experience of Qovery on a European cloud service provider 🇪🇺.

How to Establish a Culture of Secure DevOps

We’re constantly told to “Shift Left” and that Secure DevOps is the only way to have confidence in your cloud native applications. But speaking to end-users and industry colleagues, it’s clear that there are some major challenges in adopting Secure DevOps. If we read our history books, we know that DevOps wasn’t successfully adopted by buying tools, and a true cultural movement towards DevOps wasn’t established by having a small dedicated team of DevOps specialists.

Packet Capture Without "tcpdump" for Go Apps in Kubernetes

Every developer knows there are some utilities that are completely indispensable from their workflows. The programmer’s toolbelt, if you will. These toolbelts are usually different from person to person, but if there is one tool that everyone should use or at least know how to use, it is tcpdump. If you are unfamiliar, tcpdump is a tool that allows you to dump and inspect live network traffic being observed on a network interface.

Calico eBPF Data Plane Deep-Dive

Sometimes the best way to understand something is to take it apart and see how it works. This blog post will help you take the lid off your Calico eBPF data plane based Kubernetes cluster and see how the forwarding is actually happening. The bonus is, unlike home repairs, you don’t even have to try to figure out how to put it back together again! The target audience for this post is users who are already running a cluster with the eBPF data plane, either as a proof-of-concept or in production.

Observability with Zero Code Instrumentation? Meet eBPF

Current observability practice is largely based on manual instrumentation, which requires adding code in relevant points in the user’s business logic code to generate telemetry data. This can become quite burdensome and create a barrier to entry for many wishing to implement observability in their environment. This is especially true in Kubernetes environments and microservices architecture.

Uncover the optimization potential of your Kubernetes clusters with Ocean Insights

The evolution of Spot’s products has always been tightly aligned with our customers. Over the years, we’ve added integrations across the cloud stack, and developed new features that bring even more efficiency, automation and optimization to cloud infrastructure operations.

Kubernetes security policy design: 10 critical best practices

In this blog post, I will be looking at 10 best practices for Kubernetes security policy design. Application modernization is a strategic initiative that changes the way enterprises are doing business. The journey requires a significant investment in people, processes, and technology in order to achieve the desired business outcomes of accelerating the pace of innovation, optimizing cost, and improving an enterprise’s overall security posture.

Kubernetes in 2021: Where does the industry go next?

Ever since Google made Kubernetes open-source in 2014, it has enjoyed incredible growth, helping businesses of all sizes to successfully manage their containers and ultimately make the most of all that our cloud native world has to offer. Individual users certainly initially led the charge with Kubernetes, identifying issues, and generally exploring the best ways to intelligently test, manage, and deploy workloads.

Civo reviewed by respected Kubernetes guru Viktor Farcic

A couple of days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to suddenly see a tweet come in from Viktor Farcic. Viktor now works at upbound.io who developed Crossplane, and he also runs his own popular YouTube channel and co-hosts DevOps Paradox podcast. He’s well respected in the cloud native community. When I saw the tweet and noticed that Viktor had recorded a review of Civo on YouTube, I was just hoping he was kind to us...and I am pleased to say he was!

Compare Red Hat OpenShift and D2iQ's Enterprise Kubernetes Solution

As organizations look to adopt Kubernetes, they are being confronted with a growing number of Kubernetes distributions, services, and products to choose from. Navigating the Kubernetes landscape can be incredibly challenging, especially because there is no “one size fits all” solution. To help streamline the process, we compare Red Hat OpenShift and D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) across the top production-grade capabilities to consider while evaluating an enterprise Kubernetes solution.

GitOps Feature Release

It’s no secret that the software development community is starting to embrace GitOps. With the complexity of engineering modern software today, it is becoming a necessity for many companies to reassess their software development and delivery practices. When Codefresh first released GitOps 2.0 late last year, we had already planned to make it a core pillar of our platform.

Codefresh GitOps Controller

The new Codefresh GitOps dashboard gives you the perfect overview of your deployments and how they change over time. This powerful view combines information from multiple sources such as your Kubernetes services, Git Pull Requests, and JIRA issues. To help you incorporate all of this helpful information into your deployments, we have introduced the GitOps controller, a handy agent that is installed in your cluster and collects critical information about your GitOps deployments.

GitOps Current State Dashboard

At Codefresh, we are fortunate to hear from customers of all sizes and nearly every industry. A common interest is visibility into deployments and their respective environments. As a company filled with software enthusiasts and developers, this strongly resonates with our culture and our passion for empowering developers. Visibility has been an area of continuous improvement for Codefresh and something we are committed to being the best at.

Codefresh GitOps App of Apps

Microservices are powerful, but it isn’t a secret that they come with many challenges. Codefresh is acutely aware of this as we built our platform on microservices. We know what it means to maintain a fast-moving and complex software service that must remain highly available. One of the most common challenges we deal with is maintaining complex relationships at deployment time among individual microservices.

Spotlight: Serverless spark on Kubernetes

With Apache Spark now natively supporting Kubernetes, many of our customers are looking to move big data, ML, AI applications into Kubernetes. To help you along this journey, Spot by NetApp recently launched Wave, a serverless container engine designed specifically for big data applications. Built on the same core technologies as Ocean, Wave is giving big applications automated, scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure.

Spotlight: The evolution of Spot Ocean - CD for Kubernetes applications

Ocean is rising to the application level bringing Kubernetes-native continuous delivery to containers in the cloud. Spot by NetApp’s new solution, Ocean CD, takes on the most painful aspects of modern application delivery to give developers the freedom to push code fast and with confidence. Get an early preview into Ocean CD and its core features for automated progressive deployments and continous verification.

Environment variables and Secrets for Qovery v2 released

I am super excited to announce that we released the support of Environment Variables and Secrets. Watch the video to see those features in action. Environment Variables and Secrets are similar. The main difference is that the Secrets are encrypted and the value can’t be revealed. Both are injected at the build and runtime of your applications. Give it a try now! Resources: I am eager to have your feedback. Put a comment here. ‍

Terraform meets AppOps

The growing adoption of microservices and Kubernetes gave rise to the need to efficiently manage, schedule, and control Kubernetes clusters, where tools like Terraform are helping many organizations address those challenges today. Terraform is a popular choice among DevOps and Platform Engineering teams as engineers can use the tool to quickly spin up and edit environments directly from their CI/CD pipelines.

Unlimited Preview Environments with Kubernetes Namespaces

In our big series of Kubernetes anti-patterns, we briefly explained that static test environments are no longer needed if you are using Kubernetes. They are expensive, hard to maintain, and hard to clean up. Instead, we suggested the adoption of temporary environments that are created on demand when a pull request is opened. In this article, we will see the practical explanations on how to achieve unlimited temporary environments using Kubernetes namespaces.

Monitor containerized ASP.NET Core applications with Datadog APM

ASP.NET Core is an open source web development framework that enables you to develop .NET applications on macOS, Linux, and Windows machines. The introduction of .NET Core in 2016 dramatically increased the number of ways to build and deploy .NET applications. This means that you need the ability to easily monitor application performance across a wide variety of platforms, such as Docker containers.

Kubernetes Master Class - Disaster Recovery with Rancher and Kubernetes

Everything breaks at some point; whether it is infrastructure (DNS, network, storage, etc.) or Kubernetes itself, something will fail eventually. In this session, we will walk through some common failure scenarios, including identifying failures and how to respond to them in the fastest way possible using the same troubleshooting steps, scripts, and tools Rancher Support uses when supporting our Enterprise customers.

Kubernetes Master Class - Scaling Kubernetes Nodes From Rancher

Take a deep dive with Staff Engineer Luther Monson into the new node pool scale down feature recently released in Rancher v2.5.6. This masterclass will walk you through everything you will need to know to go from zero to a scaling Kubernetes cluster using Rancher. We will explore using the cluster autoscaler in tandem with this new feature to scale pools on demand. Watch a full demo of a cluster sizing up and down to load while using a custom cloud provider built for the Rancher API.

Announcing Istio integration

Adoption of service meshes like Istio is increasing. As a result, Speedscale has developed a webassembly plugin. We extended Envoy using Rust, and no changes are required to your Istio configuration. This allows us to leverage the same sidecars that you have deployed throughout your environment to inspect API traffic. Once we are listening through Istio, the typical Speedscale magic can take place. We can use the data to build integration/performance test suites and autogenerate service mocks.

What's new in Calico Enterprise 3.7: eBPF data plane, high availability, and more!

As our enterprise customers build out large, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments, they are encountering an entirely new set of complex security, observability, and networking challenges, requiring solutions that operate at scale and can be deployed both on-premises and across multiple clouds. New features in our latest release add to the already formidable capabilities of Calico Enterprise.

Compare Rancher and D2iQ's Enterprise Kubernetes Solution

In a relatively short amount of time, Kubernetes has evolved from an internal container orchestration tool at Google to the most important cloud-native technology across the world. Its rise in popularity has made Kubernetes the preferred way to build new software experiences and modernize existing applications at scale and across clouds.

Implementing an Internal Developer Platform

In a previous post, we discussed what an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is and some drivers behind IDP initiatives. If we go through our interactions with different organizations, we see teams embarking on the journey to build their IDPs mainly driven by the following requirements: While building an IDP may seem like an obvious choice and initiative, it is definitely not an easy task to accomplish. Building an IDP involves dealing with many moving components.

How to Move Kubernetes Logs to S3 with Logstash

Sometimes, the data you want to analyze lives in AWS S3 buckets by default. If that’s the case for the data you need to work with, good on you: You can easily ingest it into an analytics tool that integrates with S3. But what if you have a data source — such as logs generated by applications running in a Kubernetes cluster — that isn’t stored natively in S3? Can you manage and analyze that data in a cost-efficient, scalable way? The answer is yes, you can.

A to Z of Kubernetes and Containerization

As more enterprises shift towards cloud-native, containers are proving their worth in providing developers with a flexible way to quickly get applications up and running in the cloud. Kubernetes is an integral part of this journey, offering an industry leading container orchestration platform to automate the deployment, scaling and management of containers.

What's new in Grafana Cloud for July 2021: Traces, live streaming, Kubernetes and Docker integrations, and more

If you’re not already familiar with it, Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started observing metrics (Prometheus and Graphite), logs (Grafana Loki), traces (Grafana Tempo), and dashboards. Here are the latest features you should know about!

Demo: VMware Tanzu Standard Edition with Microsoft Azure

In this demo, we are going to look at using VMware Tanzu Standard edition with Microsoft Azure. Namely, the two products that will be seen are Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is the enterprise container runtime that utilizes cluster API to enable full lifecycle management. Global or fleet-wide management is the capability brought by Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Mission Control can inherit Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters to do provisioning and lifecycle management through its intuitive graphical user interface.

Kubernetes Incident Response: 5 Metrics to Watch

Kubernetes is a central part of modern IT infrastructure. Like any critical system, it is becoming a valuable target for attackers. In order to identify and respond to security threats, teams need metrics that indicate anomalous activity and can indicate a direction for investigation.

Qovery - the ultimate AWS web console for SaaS startups

AWS is undoubtedly one of the best Cloud service providers to run serious business out there. Reliable and cost-effective. No doubt here. But something utterly wrong with AWS is the experience on their web management console. It is so bad that thousands of developers come using Qovery every month with the only promise of - a better developer experience on top of AWS. Here are the 7 reasons why Qovery is an excellent choice for SaaS startups.

Containers vs serverless - It's about balancing simplicity with control

Chances are if you’re a developer or part of a DevOps team you’ve had a polarizing conversation or two about containers versus serverless. In this post we recap a debate hosted by NetApp on this topic. Arguing for containers is Kevin McGrath, Chief Technology Officer, Spot by NetApp. On the side of serverless is Forrest Brazeal, Director of Content and Community at A Cloud Guru. In this post we will cover the key arguments on both sides. YouTube An error occurred.

Tanzu Standard Edition: A Technical Overview in 8 Minutes

VMware Tanzu Standard builds on the foundation of Tanzu Basic by going further than Kubernetes lifecycle management. Tanzu Standard brings capabilities beyond vSphere, enabling a consistent Kubernetes experience across clouds, managing those Kubernetes clusters in a consistent fashion, and improving the security and governance using policy management at a global level. This video is a high-level look at the components to get you familiarized with them.