Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Calico is a versatile networking and security solution that features a plugable dataplane architecture. It supports various technologies, including Iptables, eBPF, Host Network Service (HNS for Windows), and Vector Packet Processing (VPP) for containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal workloads. Users can employ Calico’s network security policies to restrict traffic to and from specific clusters handling customer data and to quickly block malicious IP addresses during external attacks.

As an operations engineer (SRE, IT Operations, DevOps), managing technology and data sprawl is an ongoing challenge. Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects are helping minimize sprawl and standardize technology and data, from Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Istio, and more. Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry are becoming the de facto standard for deploying and monitoring a cloud native application.

The first quarter of the year is ending, and even though we have plenty of news in stock for the next one, it’s now time to go through our quarter retrospective. In case you missed anything, here are the most important releases of Q1!

Redis is a powerful in-memory data store thats blazing fast. It's performant, scalable, supports a wide range of data structures, has built in caching mechanisms, and is simple to set up for Cycle users. This post will take you from deploying your first Redis instance on Cycle, through deploying highly available, stateful Redis instances that are monitored by Redis Sentinel. The companion repo for this article with configuration files and settings can be found here.

Everyone knows that MicroK8s is an extremely lightweight, extensible, reliable, CNCF-compliant distribution of Kubernetes. What you didn’t know until now is that it is even easier to install and manage as part of your AWS marketplace experience. First, a quick reminder of why MicroK8s is great: What is new is that MicroK8s is now available on the AWS marketplace, combining all of MicroK8s advantages with the convenience of AWS.

As businesses grow and evolve, their needs for cloud services change too. This is especially true for companies that start with a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution like Heroku but need more control over their environment and customization options as they scale. This is where Amazon Web Services (AWS) comes in. Migrating from Heroku to AWS can be a complex process, but it allows businesses to scale their infrastructure and customize their environment to meet their specific needs.

Cloud has become the de-facto standard for new application development. Kubernetes solves many problems of modern-day cloud infrastructure. It has made microservices-based distributed software systems possible, enabling organizations to provide on-demand scaling. But at the same time, Kubernetes has also increased operational complexity. In simple terms, Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool. Container environments are dynamic and ephemeral.

CreateContainerConfigError and CreateContainerError are two of the most prevalent Kubernetes errors found in cloud-native applications. CreateContainerConfigError is an error happening when the configuration specified for a container in a Pod is not correct or is missing a vital part. CreateContainerError is a problem happening at a later stage in the container creation flow. Kubernetes displays this error when it attempts to create the container in the Pod.

We are pleased to announce that a new Rancher Desktop version with additional configuration options, deployment profiles, a gvisor-based networking stack on Windows and several other improvements has just been released!