Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2021

VMware Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise Edition: Securing APIs at Runtime

Catch this keynote preview of VMware Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise Edition at VMworld 2021. APIs can introduce exposure for your applications at runtime. Tanzu Service Mesh Enterprise Edition is designed to help you reduce this runtime risk through visibility, secure policies, and root cause analysis.

Kubernetes 1.23 - What's new?

Kubernetes 1.23 is about to be released, and it comes packed with novelties! Where do we begin? This release brings 45 enhancements, on par with the 56 in Kubernetes 1.22 and the 50 in Kubernetes 1.21. Of those 45 enhancements, 11 are graduating to Stable, a whopping 15 are existing features that keep improving, and 19 are completely new. The new features included in this version are generally small, but really welcomed. Like the kubectl events command, support for OpenAPI v3, or gRPC probes.

New Ideas On How To Install Epinio

Epinio, the application development engine for Kubernetes, is meant to take you from app to URL in one step. It does that by either applying buildpacks to your app or using a pre-built docker image. Epinio installs into any Kubernetes cluster to bring your application from source code to deployment and allow for developers and operators to work better together.

Tanzu Talk: Two Tools to Modernize Legacy Apps - the VMware App Transformer & App Navigator

Most large organizations have 100’s, if not 1,000’s of apps that need to be modernized. 76% of executives said they are too invested in legacy applications to change. Join me for a little study on tools to help in #TanzuTalk. (Apologies for the robot voice towards the end - the cables must have been jiggled too much.) In today’s episode, Coté learns about and summarizes the VMware App Transformer. Then , he watches and comments on a recent talk by Martin Clarkson on the the VMware App Navigator service.

A Developer focused CI/CD pipeline for Kubernetes

As Kubernetes becomes the key target environment across many organizations, it automatically becomes an essential topic for developers. However, Kubernetes was created for operations and, unless you spend a considerable amount of time learning and specializing yourself, it is still challenging to use. Developers should rather focus on delivering applications instead, and a developer or application-focused platform is needed to enable that.

Private 5G and Private LTE For Communication Service Providers

As we progress further into the next phases of the wireless evolution, we find that enterprises and consumers have an insatiable appetite for speed and new services. They are adopting the current 5th Generation (5G) mobile network as quickly as it becomes available. However, they require use cases with unprecedented mobility, security, low-latency and tighter integration between wireless and mission critical applications.

Introduction to Kubernetes

From Raspberry Pis to satellites in space, Kubernetes continues to be the lifeblood of the cloud-native landscape and is a fast-moving train increasing in both popularity and demand, among businesses and developers. As a result, K8s has experienced rapid adoption and progressive development as an ecosystem. But what exactly is Kubernetes and why is it so popular? Even more, what are the necessary basics for someone to get started with K8s?

Control the complexities of containers with the Ocean Suite for Kubernetes

In the relatively short window of time that Kubernetes has been around, it’s rapidly matured as a critical technology foundation for the cloud, and now even applications that were previously thought to be unviable for containers are running with Kubernetes. As companies expand their usage of it, the need to operationalize Kubernetes with automation and optimization is critical to maintaining speed, agility and control in the long-term.

How Qovery Community plan works

Since we launched Qovery in January 2020, we offered free hosting ("Community" plan) for every developer. Providing free hosting was the perfect way to get product feedback and iterate with our users without the cost constraint. As our hosting infrastructure costs have drastically grown within the last 18 months, we had to reinvent our free offer. In a nutshell, we will continue to offer free hosting to involved community members only. Keep reading to know more 👇

CloudHedge Technologies Achieves AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Status

Plano, Texas – 29th November, 2021 – CloudHedge Technologies, Inc, announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration and Modernization Competency status for AWS Partners. This designation recognizes that CloudHedge’s App Modernization platform—OmniDeq™ powered by R6Ai™— has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success automating and accelerating customer application migration and modernization journeys.

Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu Is Now in Tech Preview

Enterprises worldwide are embracing innovations such as the cloud to solve their digital needs, but many face challenges with workload migration and application modernization. One way organizations can ease their application modernization journeys is to adopt the 5 R’s framework—rehost, replatform, refactor, retain, and retire—allowing them to choose the right migration strategy for their specific environment.

Kubernetes Master Class GitOps and Fleet Multi Cluster CD with EKS, GKE and AKS

GitOps is a relatively new model with a fast adoption rate because of how it enhances the continuous delivery workflow in the Kubernetes context. GitOps requires you to describe and observe systems with declarative configurations that will form the basis of continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment of your infrastructure. In this session, we will focus on making use of Fleet to manage deployments to multiple downstream clusters at scale.

Kubernetes Master Class Security & Observability feat. Tigera

In this RKE-focused workshop for networking, security, and observability on containers, Kubernetes, and Calico, you will work with a Calico and RKE expert to learn how to design, deploy, and observe security and networking policies in an RKE environment. This 90-minute hands-on lab comes with your own provisioned Calico Cloud environment, designed to provide more complete knowledge on how to implement:– Workload access controls– Compliance and reporting– Run-time visualization of traffic flow and security policies– Service-level observability– Anomaly detection and live troubleshooting You will come away from this workshop with an understanding of how others in your industry are doing Kubernetes, container and cloud security, and observability in RKE, and how you can implement it in your own organization.

Kubernetes Master Class Managing Cluster Security at Scale

A Kubernetes cluster has various attack surfaces, from the API server to application traffic. It's important to understand what these potential areas of attack are, and from there, work out the best ways to mitigate the risks. This is especially important when managing multiple clusters. You want to ensure that you are following the right methods, and then standardizing those security approaches to be applied to all your clusters. In this session, we will cover some of the Kubernetes attack vectors and detail how to secure your clusters.

Kubernetes 1.23 rc testing with MicroK8s

Today, Kubernetes 1.23 release candidate was made available upstream for testing and experimentation. General availability is planned for December 7th, so now is the time to report back any issues or bugs. Developers, DevOps and open source software enthusiasts can try out the latest features using MicroK8s. MicroK8s is a lightweight, CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution with a streamlined UX.

5 Things Developers Need to Know About Kubernetes Management

Kubernetes management can be daunting for developers who don’t have specialized understanding of the orchestration technology. Learning Kubernetes takes practice and time, a precious commodity for devs who are under pressure to deliver new applications. This post provides direction on what you need to know and what you can skip to take advantage of Kubernetes. Let’s start with five things you need to know.

What's new in Sysdig - November 2021

Welcome to a new update of “What’s new in Sysdig.” Happy All Saints’/Souls’ Day! Happy International Pianist Day! Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Diwali! Glad alla helgons dag. The “What’s new in Sysdig” blog has been rotated to a new team, and this month, Peter Andersson is responsible for the publishing. Thanks to Chris Kranz for an excellent job compiling these articles earlier.

Turbocharging AKS networking with Calico eBPF

A single Kubernetes cluster expends a small percentage of its total available assigned resources on delivering in-cluster networking. We don’t have to be satisfied with this, though—achieving the lowest possible overhead can provide significant cost savings and performance improvements if you are running network-intensive workloads.

Crossplane and Shipa 101 - Your First Crossplane Abstraction

Kubernetes is viewed as one of the great equalizers between development and operations teams. Simply write a manifest and the declarative power of Kubernetes is off to fulfill your desired state. Kubernetes is certainly pluggable and has the ability to be extended / opinions being swapped internally. As any IT organization can tell you, even with Kubernetes there is a lot of integration work, and several parts of the stack such as IaC have been left outside of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes Security: 9 Best Practices for Keeping It Safe

Kubernetes dominates the container orchestration market in every way. According to the latest State of Kubernetes and Container Security study, 88% of enterprises utilise Kubernetes to manage a portion of their container workloads. Kubernetes and other orchestration systems have given software deployment and management a new level of robustness and customization. They also brought attention to the current security landscape's shortcomings.

A 3-step guide to troubleshooting and visualizing Kubernetes with Grafana Cloud

Back in May, we announced the Kubernetes integration to help users easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes cluster metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud. Since then, we’ve made some improvements to help our customers go even further.

VMware Tanzu Compliance Updates Support US Federal Agencies

Kubernetes has become an ever-larger target for workloads across all industries. The public sector, in particular, experiences several hurdles in achieving effective utilization of this relatively new technology. Of particular concern for the public sector in the United States is the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS).

Challenges maintaining Prometheus LTS

In this article, we’ll cover the three main challenges you may face when maintaining your own Prometheus LTS solution. In the beginning, Prometheus claimed that it wasn’t a long-term metrics storage, the expected outcome was that somebody would eventually create that long-term storage (LTS) for Prometheus metrics. Currently, there are several open-source projects to provide long-term storage (Prometheus LTS). These community projects are ahead of the rest: Cortex, Thanos, and M3.

Deploying to production in <5m with our hosted container builder

Fast build times are great, which is why we aim for less than 5m between merging a PR and getting it into production. Not only is waiting on builds a waste of developer time — and an annoying concentration breaker — the speed at which you can deploy new changes has an impact on your shipping velocity. Put simply, you can ship faster and with more confidence when deploying a follow-up fix is a simple, quick change.

Real-time threat response for Kubernetes workloads, using threat intelligence feeds and deep packet inspection

Cloud-native transformations come with many security and troubleshooting challenges. Real-time intrusion detection and the prevention of continuously evolving threats is challenging for cloud-native applications in Kubernetes. Due to the ephemeral nature of pods, it is difficult to determine source or destination endpoints and limit their blast radius. Traditional perimeter-based firewalls are not ideal fit for Kubernetes and containers.

A Simple Guide to Taming the Beast That Is Kubernetes

Containers are amazing. But when you start to orchestrate them in a complex environment, they can become quite the beast. Kubernetes is one of the best tools to tame that beast, but few resources exist to help you manage your big data workloads on Kubernetes. If you want to learn how you can optimize your big data workloads on Kubernetes, this is for you.

Terraform and Shipa 101 - Your First Terraform and Shipa Cloud Integration

Leveraging Terraform, which is an infrastructure-as-code platform, is a great match. Using both technologies together is becoming more mature and there have been some great pieces around the art of the possible between the two platforms. Though if you are unfamiliar with both, this guide will get you up and started with both Terraform and Shipa together. In this example will be using Terraform to create all of the necessary Shipa resources to deploy to a Kubernetes cluster.

Demystifying the complexity of cloud-native 5G network functions deployment using Robin CNP

Some of the key requirements as operators deploy #telecom data centers include managing their NFs in a cloud-native world to achieve low-latency and high throughput for #5G applications, meeting scalability targets, achieving bare-metal performance without virtualization overheads, and so on. Robin’s #CloudNative Platform solves various challenges associated with #5G CNF deployments, along with delivering the convenience of zero touch automation, multi-cloud portability, and hyperscale orchestration.

[Webinar] 5 Things to Consider When Migrating Databases to Kubernetes with Komodor & Ondat

Kubernetes is eating the world...at least the world of modern software engineering. Besides their applications, most businesses consider their data as the holy grail. It is key to the value they deliver. As they progress through application modernization, Kubernetes is the natural foundation to support their effort. But where should the data go? Is Kubernetes safe enough to take care of it? How to prepare for DB related incidents in an everchanging environment?

Edging Closer to 5G with Automation

5G use cases and applications require unprecedented mobility, security, low-latency and tighter integration between wireless and mission-critical applications. To enable these expectations, intelligent infrastructure and automation technologies are being increasingly adopted worldwide. This is proving to be the fundamental backbone of successful, competitive business that is thriving to deliver industry 4.0 and 5G applications worldwide.

VMware Tanzu Advanced Quarterly Update: Driving DevOps Metrics that Matter

It is imperative for DevOps success that operations teams provide a good developer experience and that developers have what they need for productive workflows. When this is done automatically and seamlessly, teams can get code to production faster. However, it’s not enough to get code committed quickly. That code must also be compliant and secure. Developers should not find out at the last minute that they used a noncompliant package leading to hours of re-work.

Robin.io wins Automation Solution Award | FutureNet World Awards 2021

Robin.io was named the winner of the Automation Solution Award at the 2021 FutureNet World Awards. Considering the illustrious group of finalists, the award recognition validates Robin’s efforts to provide operators with software solutions that provision network capacity, automate service delivery and reduce operating costs.

Sysdig & SUSE: Security & Visibility for SUSE Rancher

Securing a cloud-native environment, such as SUSE Rancher, requires unique considerations. New abstractions like containers, plus the dynamic nature of a Kubernetes orchestrated environment can hamper visibility, especially for legacy tools that aren’t designed for containers and cloud. To help, Sysdig and SUSE have launched a SUSE One Partner Solution Stack designed to not only showcase our joint solution, but also to provide easy ways for you to get started.

Overview: See the VMware Tanzu Application Platform DevSecOps Experience

This video demonstrates how you can use the VMware Tanzu Application Platform to help accelerate your organization's DevSecOps culture. We demonstrate how Tanzu Application Platform can use an outer loop supply chain to automatically take your application from source code to URL using a supply chain that includes continuous integration testing, source code and image scanning, container build, and, finally, deployment.

Kubernetes and the Enterprise

As more organizations transition to cloud-native applications in the enterprise, Kubernetes and its APIs are laying the foundation for a next era of distributed computing. But despite its growing adoption in the enterprise, Kubernetes remains complex to implement and manage effectively. This topic spotlight highlights the most common challenges of Kubernetes in the enterprise and offers up some recommendations on how to make Kubernetes adoption smooth and effective to drive productivity and business value.

Building your Database-as-a-service for MySQL workloads on Robin

Database-as-a-service (DBaaS) is a cloud computing service model that enables DBAs and developers to quickly deploy and manage enterprise-grade databases without the need for setting up physical hardware, installing software and configuring databases for performance.

Why and how to monitor AWS EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, or EKS, is a managed Kubernetes service. That means that Amazon Web Services (AWS) handles some of the deployment and management tasks for users. But the fact that EKS is a managed service doesn’t mean that AWS manages all administrative tasks. One key management task that isn’t fully covered as part of EKS is monitoring.

New Ocean feature - minimum nodes per Virtual Node Group

Spot by NetApp’s Ocean continually optimizes a Kubernetes cluster’s data plane. When Ocean identifies nodes that aren’t being fully utilized, it simulates various bin packing scenarios. Once a more efficient layout is identified, Ocean reschedules pods, and then gracefully terminates the underutilized nodes. Ocean’s continuous optimization of cluster infrastructure saves your organization money and is better for planet Earth!

Ketch Now in the Civo Cloud Marketplace - Getting Started

Just behind the Ketch 0.6 Release, Ketch is now available for the first time in the Civo Marketplace. If you are unfamiliar with Civo, Civo is a Kubernetes based cloud provider allowing for the rapid creation of Kubernetes clusters. No matter where you are in the Kubernetes journey, the pairing of Civo and Ketch can allow you to fast-track your Kubernetes learnings or further your developer experience and guardrails with Kubernetes.

In Studio NMG - Private 5G for CSPs

Enterprises worldwide are adopting intelligent infrastructure and automation technologies as they prepare to deploy Industry 4.0 applications. Private 5G, along with Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN), will enable these expectations. Private 5G networks deployed by MNOs, CSPs and Systems Integrators (SIs), will consist of an ecosystem of partner companies to create new services and solutions. This is increasingly important in Private 5G since, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. User application requirements will vary depending on size, industry, applications, and desired operating models, and they will evolve as their business needs change. This session points out the reasons that Private 5G is the right technology choice for CSPs, and the challenges of deploying a Private 5G network.

Top Three Challenges in Building New Kubernetes Ecosystems: Public Sector Innovation

Worldwide container management revenue will grow strongly from a small base of $465.8 million in 2020, to reach $944 million in 2024, according to a new forecast from Gartner, Inc. Among the various subsegments, public cloud container orchestration and serverless container offerings will experience the most significant growth. The benefit of Kubernetes is that it makes it possible to manage and deploy modern applications with increased speed and efficiency.

Kubernetes Application-Level API

The Kubernetes API is the front end of the Kubernetes control plane and is how users can interact with their clusters. In essence, it’s the interface used to manage, create, and configure the cluster and the state of objects. Using a standard API, Kubernetes allowed teams to focus on constructs and consume infrastructure across different providers.

Infrastructure as Code, part 1: create a Kubernetes cluster with Terraform

This series shows you how to get started with infrastructure as code (IaC). The goal is to help developers build a strong understanding of IaC through tutorials and code examples. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an integral part of modern continuous integration pipelines. It is the process of managing and provisioning cloud and IT resources using machine readable definition files.

Overview: See the VMware Tanzu Application Platform DevSecOps Experience

This video demonstrates how you can use the VMware Tanzu Application Platform to help accelerate your DevSecOps culture. In it, we show how the Tanzu Application Platform can use an outer loop supply chain to automatically take your application from source code to URL using a supply chain that includes continuous integration testing, source code and image scanning, container build, and, finally, deployment.

What is Kubernetes Lens?

As a DevOps Engineer, one day you’re performing magic in the terminal, settling clusters, and feeling like a god. On some other days, you feel like a total fraud and scam. Errors and bugs appear from everywhere, you don’t know where to start, and you don’t know where to look. Sadly, days like this come far too often. To be more specific, what often causes these bad days is none other than Kubernetes itself.

The Astronomical scope of Private 5G - and how to unlock its massive benefits

As enterprises prepare to deploy Industry 4.0 applications, they are increasingly adopting intelligent infrastructure and newer automation technologies. With aggressive digitalization comes an insatiable appetite for improved performance and new services. Enterprises and customers are adopting the current 5th Generation (5G) mobile network as quickly as it becomes available.

VMware Tanzu Advanced: A Day in the Life of Cody the Developer and Alana the Operator

This is an excerpt from a Meet the Experts session for VMware Tanzu Advanced edition at VMworld 2021. It provides a brief refresh of the Tanzu Advanced capabilities and then dives into a role play exercise to show how Tanzu Advanced can simplify and accelerate developer and operator workflows.

Mario vs. Steve: What Video Games Can Teach Us about Monitoring vs. Observability

Credit: Unsplash What is monitoring? What is observability? Monitoring shows you how a Kubernetes environment and all of its layers are operating. Observability, on the other hand, is a measure of how well internal states of a system can be inferred from knowledge of its external outputs.

Civo update - November 2021

In case you missed the big news, after almost two years in beta and early access phases, Civo is now general availability! Find out what this means for Civo and the future of the platform over at our blog. We've also launched the first-ever Civo Hackathon! This is an initiative to bring together developers, architects, experts, and students from across the globe to develop innovative Kubernetes projects on Civo.

Five Kubernetes Deployment Best Practices (Part 2)

In our previous post , we focused on tips for making the transition and migration to Kubernetes a smoother, and less painful process. In this post, we’d like to now provide some tips from the operational trenches for future-proofing your Kubernetes operation, after making the move. Kubernetes, as a software-driven system, has many benefits for engineers and DevOps teams to take advantage of.

Four Best Practices to Migrate to Kubernetes (Part 1)

Kubernetes has evolved into the leading platform to build your microservices systems. Given its increased maturity over the past few years as well as the robust ecosystem which has been built around its technology, Kubernetes has become more production-ready than ever. Nevertheless, it still has its own unique set of challenges. In particular, it brings a lot of complexity into play with its adoption.

Fast and simple troubleshooting with GUI-based Dynamic Packet Capture

With the Calico 3.10 release, Dynamic Packet Capture is available in Dynamic Service Graph. This means users who require self-service, live troubleshooting for microservices and Kubernetes workloads can capture and evaluate traffic packets on endpoints without writing a single line of code or using any 3rd-party troubleshooting tools. Users don’t need to learn about or have knowledge of kubectl or YAML to troubleshoot their microservices and Kubernetes cluster.

KubeCon North America 2021 roundup

KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2021 was a whirlwind of sessions, talks, panels, bonding, and learning. As it was a hybrid event, Civo was represented both in person at a booth that featured Sophia and David from our North American team, as well as virtually through our online booth and talks. Plus, we made an announcement of the General Availability of Civo Kubernetes at the event!

Open Source for Better Observability

Monitoring cloud-native systems is hard. You’ve got highly distributed apps spanning tens and hundreds of nodes, services and instances. You’ve got additional layers and dimensions—not just bare metal and OS, but also node, pod, namespace, deployment version, Kubernetes’ control plane and more. To make things more interesting, any typical system these days uses many third-party frameworks, whether open source or cloud services.

Learn How to Simplify Kubernetes Performance Management | Pepperdata

Complex applications running on Kubernetes scale super fast, but this can create visibility gaps that can make detecting and troubleshooting Kubernetes issues as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. Although Docker and Kubernetes are now becoming standard components when building and orchestrating applications, you’re still responsible for managing the performance of applications built atop this new stack.

Label standard and best practices for Kubernetes security

In this blog post, I will be talking about label standard and best practices for Kubernetes security. This is a common area where I see organizations struggle to define the set of labels required to meet their security requirements. My advice is to always start with a hierarchical security design that is capable of achieving your enterprise security and compliance requirements, then define your label standard in alignment with your design.

Kubernetes Fully Managed: Overcoming CIOs challenges

Kubernetes is everywhere! In the public and private cloud, and from the enterprise to startups, the majority of IT executives around the world have explored Kubernetes, and how it has evolved the way many organisations are developing and deploying their applications. But what is scary about it, and how can organisations better leverage one of the greatest tools in the field while overcoming the biggest challenges facing CIOs when adopting Kubernetes?

How Tanzu Application Platform Improves the Inner Loop for Developers

VMware Tanzu Application Platform provides a set of developer tools that allows developers to debug a running container on any Kubernetes cluster, whether running locally or as a managed Kubernetes cluster on the cloud, from the IDE itself. The tooling also shortens the path for live updates of code changes by eliminating the steps of rebuilding, republishing, and deploying the container, instead directly injecting the updated code to the running container.

Recognizing and Removing Friction Points in the Developer Experience on Kubernetes

Kubernetes is a game-changing technological advancement, enabling infrastructure and operations teams to automate application deployment and management at scale. But it has also presented new challenges to developers. As organizations adopt cloud native application paradigms, they face a developer experience crisis due to the complexity of the cloud native ecosystem and a steep learning curve for developing applications for Kubernetes.