KoolKits (Kubernetes toolkits) are highly-opinionated, language-specific, batteries-included debug container images for Kubernetes. In practice, they’re what you would’ve installed on your production pods if you were stuck during a tough debug session in an unfamiliar shell. To briefly give some background, note that these container images are intended for use with the new kubectl debug feature, which spins up Ephemeral containers for interactive troubleshooting.

Creating a DevOps workflow to optimize application deployments to your Kubernetes cluster can be a complex journey. I recently demonstrated how to optimize your local K8s development workflow with Rancher Desktop and Skaffold. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it by viewing the video below. You might be wondering, “What happens next?” How do you extend this solution beyond a local setup to a real-world pipeline with a remote cluster?

This article was inspired by our recent "5 tools to increase Kubernetes developer productivity" video, hosted by Saiyam Pathak and Kunal Kushwaha. Over the years Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform, as such it's crucial that developers have the right set of tools to increase their productivity for development and operations. In this article, we take a look at five such tools that can help developers inprove productivity while when Kubernetes. Let’s jump in.

Continuing on from Part One where we went through a brief history of containers and Kubernetes then Dockerized a NodeJS application, now we are ready to deploy to Kubernetes. If this is your first or nth time deploying to Kubernetes, Shipa makes this simple. You don’t have to worry about authoring multiple Kubernetes manifests and templates to deploy your application, all you need is an image.

Why this combination you ask? Load testing is my passion, and I am partial to Kubernetes. I challenged myself to share a use case that many could relate to, focused on a business critical application. Websites came to mind and WordPress is the world’s most popular website management system. Of course, nginx is the most popular web server so let’s throw that into the mix. And Kubernetes? With more than 50% of corporations adopting Kubernetes in 2021, what better system to run in.

Since its introduction in 2014 to the world, Kubernetes has been helping usher in the next generation of distributed workloads. As workloads started to be containerized, so did the need to manage the containers, thus the inception of container orchestrators. There have been a few container orchestrators out there before Kubernetes such as Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos. Though as a feature developer, Kubernetes can certainly feel like an 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Defining, building, and delivering a secure software supply chain is challenging for many organizations. Software builds utilize many open source components, and the vast landscape of cloud native developer and platform tools grows more extensive and more diverse every day. Developers, operators, and security teams must work together to ensure software is delivered swiftly and securely to meet business and customer desires.

In this article, you’ll learn how Starlink works in a domestic environment, and how to monitor Starlink connection with Prometheus. SpaceX’s Starlink uses satellites in low-earth orbit to provide high-speed Internet services to most of the planet. During the beta, Starlink expects users to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms. It’s also expected that there will be brief periods of no connectivity at all.

The rise of cloud native and containerization, along with the automation of the CI/CD pipeline, introduced fundamental changes to existing application development, deployment, and security paradigms. Because cloud native is so different from traditional architectures, both in how workloads are developed and how they need to be secured, there is a need to rethink our approach to security in these environments.

5G has proven to be a game-changer for several businesses. Given the advancements in O-RAN contributed by cloud-native design & 5G Core, telecommunication vendors, Communication Service Providers (CSPs), and enterprises are trying to deliver an extraordinary customer experience by leveraging 5G. This also presents a massive opportunity for service providers to simplify and enhance customer experience, fortify existing revenue streams, and tap into new markets.

For many of us in the technology world, around the holidays family will always ask you to solve their technology problems. Being in February, I am only several months away from sharing the below card with my family, again.

Today we are going to explore getting started using Argo CD. This post is going to assume you know a bit about containers, and that you already have an empty cluster in place (or know how to create one). If any of this is unfamiliar, head over to Understanding the Basics to get a bit of practice. Before we get started, let’s talk about GitOps.

Welcome to the second iteration of What’s New in Sysdig in 2022! Before starting, once again, we wish you a happy Spring Festival, Seol-Nal, Tet Nguyen Dan, Tsagaan Sar, and Lailat al Miraj.

Last updated 2/22/2022 Argo CD is used by some of the largest and most secure companies on earth with sensitive and very important workloads. In 2022, it’s all the more critical to make sure Argo CD is running securely within your organization. As Argo continues the process of CNCF graduation, additional security audits and improvements to project security are underway.

Learning Kubernetes (K8s) can be intimidating. There are so many great tools to increase your use of K8s, it’s confusing to know where to begin. You learned how to walk by first learning to crawl. In the same way, to effectively integrate K8s into your software infrastructure, you need to build a foundation一a foundation of knowledge where you understand the capability of K8s and how it can improve your organization’s operations.

This article is a part of our DevOps blog series inspired by our DevOps bootcamp live streams available to watch on our YouTube channel. As a developer constantly working with code, it’s only natural to feel the need to test your code frequently. Testing helps detect bugs and protect against any of the same in the future.

Recently we had the privilege of being named a Gartner Cool Vendor in the Monitoring and Observability category. The funny thing is, while this is definitely the closest Gartner category for our solution, we aren’t really used to thinking about Komodor as a monitoring and observability tool.

Calico Cloud has just celebrated its 1-year anniversary! And what better way to celebrate than to launch new features and capabilities that help users address their most urgent cloud security needs. Over the past year, the Tigera team has seen rapid adoption of Calico Cloud for security and observability of cloud-native applications.

In a world where organizations are often defined by the digital services they can deliver, it’s crucial for underlying IT infrastructure to move as quickly as the business demands. To support our customers with getting the most out of a Kubernetes powered environment, we continue to make enhancements to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. In this post we’ll discuss some of the new capabilities our customers will benefit from using in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5.

When business is growing rapidly, the necessity to scale the processes is obvious. If your initial infrastructure hasn’t been thought through with scalability in mind, growing your infrastructure may be quite painful. The common tactic, in this case, is to transition to cloud native architecture. In this post, we will talk about what you need to know when you’re scaling up with the cloud so that you can weigh the pros and cons and make an informed decision.

We covered the what, when and why of Service Mesh in a previous post. Now I’d like to talk about why they are critical in Kubernetes. To understand the importance of using service meshes when working with microservices-based applications, let’s start with a story. Suppose that you are working on a big microservices-based banking application, where any mistake can have serious impacts. One day the development team receives a feature request to add a rating functionality to the application.

Kubernetes has experienced rapid growth over the years, with a recent post from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation reporting a userbase increase of about 67% in just the past year. Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that automates how containers are deployed, how they communicate, and how traffic is routed between them; it also scales configurations for both the containerized workloads and the underlying infrastructure that comprises the cluster.

We are pleased to announce today that Shipa, the cloud-native Application as Code platform is now available on the AWS Marketplace. Bringing the power of Shipa to your internal customers on AWS infrastructure has never been easier with click to install from the AWS Marketplace.

The global chip shortage, which began in 2020, continues as demand for semiconductor chips continues to far outpace production. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently forecast shortages to be sustained through at least the remainder of 2022. As a result, IT operations teams at almost every company we’ve talked with have felt the crunch in the form of skyrocketing prices and delays of up to a year for procurement of physical servers.

At VMware, as we talk to enterprise customers about their application deployment patterns, challenges, and future requirements, we observe a common theme. Most of them are embarking on a modern application design and deployment path by using containers and Kubernetes as foundational technologies and by implementing their applications as microservices.

In today’s world, graphics processing units or GPUs have attracted a lot of attention as the optimal vehicle to run artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) workloads. These workloads require massive amounts of data, both ultra-high speed and parallel processing, along with flexibility and high availability. It is clear that high-performance computing (HPC) with graphics processing unit (GPU) systems are required to support cutting-edge workloads.

In this edition we have news of two new initiatives to help businesses and developers alike with their Kubernetes endeavours. Plus we were excited to discover that Civo was recently featured in CRN's 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Companies as part of The 2022 Cloud 100!

VMware continues to heavily invest in Cloud Foundry and Tanzu Application Service, VMware’s distribution of Cloud Foundry, to ensure it remains the best place to run business-critical applications. Let’s dive a little deeper to see these exciting investments in action.

You have to make lots of technical, architectural, and organizational choices. Knowing what your peers, analysts, and tech leaders are thinking about can help you make decisions about where and how to invest your time, money, and energy. That’s why we’ve compiled this roundup of ideas from tech decision makers, leaders, and analysts to help you focus.

First-generation security solutions for cloud-native applications have been failing because they apply a legacy mindset where the focus is on vulnerability scanning instead of a holistic approach to threat detection, threat prevention, and remediation. Given that the attack surface of modern applications is much larger than in traditional apps, security teams are struggling to keep up and we’ve seen a spike in breaches.

As a product designer at VMware Tanzu Labs, I’m often having conversations on the value of design in product development. I was discussing design with a client stakeholder one day and made the comment that “Nobody can tell who the designer is on my team.” At first, they were a bit confused by this statement. “Aren’t the designers the ones who create the designs of the product?” they said.

I am excited to share that we’ve just launched our first open source project called ValidKube. The idea behind Validkube is to fuse together the capabilities of three other popular open-source projects (kubeval, kubectl-neat and trivy by Aqua) and present them in a single view, providing users with a way to ensure YAML code hygiene and security, all at the same time and with just a few clicks of the button.

Now that conferences are finally coming back, what better way to emerge from uncertainty with a strategy marked for success? If you’re wondering which technology conferences and events to attend, how about starting with containers and Kubernetes? As the leading platform technology underlying containers, Kubernetes can help you build, deploy, and manage applications faster and at scale.

Shipa is now 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. The engineering efficiency and developer experience that Shipa brings can supercharge your Kubernetes experience on Civo. Now you can spin up a Shipa Control Plane e.g Shipa Self-Managed with a click of a button on Civo Cloud.

This article is based on a true story. The names of the company and people involved were changed to protect the innocent 🙂 . A few weeks ago, we were contacted by a pretty big e-commerce company. We can’t really share their name but, for the purpose of this story, let’s call them “KubeCorp Inc”. They reached out to us following an edge-case incident they had, which resulted in severe downtime.

Typically, Infrastructure-as-Code or IaCs have had their own languages to learn. For example, if leveraging Terraform most likely you came across Terraform’s native syntax, HCL. Though as software engineers we might be more familiar with other languages of choice. Using a general-purpose computer language vs a provider level syntax does unlock the power of the language; anything you can do in the computer language potentially can be additional methods, calls, etc.

Operators using VMware Tanzu Mission Control can now create and manage image registry secrets. This new feature of Tanzu Mission Control enables people to create image registry secrets in a single namespace and make them available for use by all namespaces in a cluster, providing a single place to manage all registry secrets for that cluster.

Releasing new features seamlessly with no downtime in a rapidly evolving microservices-based application can be challenging. VMware Tanzu Service Mesh makes this process easier, removing much of the complexity involved with rolling out progressive updates to cloud native apps. Here we explain how it works.

Kubernetes is one of the most popular platforms for managing and deploying applications built on microservices and containers. For the public sector, deploying pure upstream Kubernetes in offline, air-gapped environments can be a big challenge. Especially when you’re dealing with strict security controls and limited bandwidth, processes, and resources in place to ramp up quickly.

Kubernetes monitoring involves tracking application performance and resource utilization across cluster components, such as pods, containers, and services. The goal is to gain visibility into the health and security of your clusters. Kubernetes provides built-in features for monitoring, including the resource metrics pipeline that tracks several metrics like node CPU and memory usage and a full metrics pipeline.

VMware Tanzu Application Platform is a modular, application-aware platform that gives developers a prepaved path to production for building and deploying software on any compliant public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster. Designed to deliver a superior and secure developer experience, it makes the software supply chain even more secure with a suite of features, including vulnerability scanning, a software bill of materials, and image signing, and more.

As a software engineer, I admit I am not the best at networking. Can’t connect to your app for some reason, one going joke is to “always blame DNS” e.g the Domain Name System. My personal DNS experience is usually editing a few records for my personal blog and connecting a few tools and that is it. Thanks to distributed systems, had to learn all about SRV records and some more DNS concepts.

CloudHedge’s OmniDeq™, worlds leading platform for automating App Modernization has been recognized by NASSCOM in the Emerge 50 Awards for 2021 and has also secured a spot in the League of Top 10 Enterprises under the “SaaS” Award Category.

Today, I’m delighted to announce that Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu is now generally available. Application Transformer for Tanzu is a tool that aids in the discovery, analysis, and containerization of legacy applications, thus helping customers to simplify and accelerate their app modernization journeys by targeting their re-platforming strategy on the well-known “5 R” modernization framework.

It’s an exciting day at Sysdig as we announce our channel-first approach to doing business. What does this mean exactly? Going forward, we will be conducting sales for all customers outside of the Global 500 through a channel partner. For more than three decades, customers have leveraged channel partners as trusted advisors for vendor-agnostic IT consultation and expertise. Our channel-first approach moves Sysdig in line with how customers buy.

Cybersecurity continues to be a thorny problem for businesses and government agencies as breaches, disruptions, and data thefts continue to escalate. To help ensure that the growing number of government and private organizations implementing Kubernetes solutions have the highest possible levels of security, the National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued guidelines for hardening the security of Kubernetes implementations.

As open-source software evolves and grows, it’s important that organizations, both large and small, can scale to keep up with their end user’s needs. At Codefresh, we are announcing a new release of our platform, Codefresh Software Delivery Platform, powered by Argo (CSDP) which delivers a scalable deployment management platform with Argo. Some of the major new features include the following support: These are some of the major new features in Codefresh’s new platform.

One of the major components of the Codefresh Software Delivery Platform is the Workflows capability that allows you to define any kind of software process for creating artifacts, running unit tests, running security scans, and all other actions that are typically used in Continuous Integration (CI). At first glance, Codefresh Workflows might look like the typical pipelines that you would find in any popular CI product but if you look under the hood you will realize looks can be deceiving.

Delivering new software is the single most important function of businesses trying to compete today. Many companies get stuck with flaky scripting, manual interventions, complex processes, and large unreliable tool stacks across diverse infrastructure. Software teams are left scrambling to understand their software supply chain and discover the root cause of failures. It’s time for a new approach.

This article explores how to secure production Kubernetes clusters with the help of open source tools. As a prerequisite, you’ll need to have basic beginner-level knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes. In a nutshell, Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool and Docker is a containerization platform. Some of the most famous Kubernetes clusters managed by cloud providers include AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google CKE.

The Project Calico community is one of the most collaborative and supportive communities in the open-source space. Our community has shown great engagement through the years, which has helped us maintain and grow the project. Thanks to our 200+ contributors from all over the world, Calico Open Source (the solution born out of the project) is powering 1.5M+ nodes daily across 166 countries.

As more customers start to see the benefits of Kubernetes in orchestrating their containerized applications, VMware Tanzu Mission Control continues to evolve with new features that meet operational challenges. With the addition of Terraform provider support, Tanzu Mission Control enables increased DevOps velocity by offering an additional route to consistent deployments and management of Kubernetes.