Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Implementing distributed tracing is fast becoming a fundamental expectation when building modern (distributed) systems. However, this is yet another thing for developers to learn, and configuring distributed tracing on Kubernetes is hard, right? Actually, no. Getting started with Jaeger on Kubernetes has never been easier.

Shipa, Corp., delivering a cloud native application management framework built to manage the full application lifecycle, today announced that it is open sourcing Ketch, Shipa’s deployment engine, under Apache License Version 2.0. This open source release is available on GitHub and follows the general availability launch of Shipa’s full application management framework in October.

On November 11, 2020, I had the pleasure of speaking with two incredible thought leaders in the DevOps space: Vivek Pandey, VP of Engineering at Shipa (https://www.shipa.io), and Patrick Deuley, Sr Product Manager at GitLab (https://www.gitlab.com). The topic of the discussion was “Monolith to Microservices,” and we covered three key areas: Starting out, Scaling and Developer Experience.

We created the Fleet Project to provide centralized GitOps-style management of a large number of Kubernetes clusters. A key design goal of Fleet is to be able to manage 1 million geographically distributed clusters. When we architected Fleet, we wanted to use a standard Kubernetes controller architecture. This meant in order to scale, we needed to prove we could scale Kubernetes much farther than we ever had.

The control plane is the brain and heart of Kubernetes. All of its components are key to the proper working and efficiency of the cluster. Monitor Kubernetes control plane is just as important as monitoring the status of the nodes or the applications running inside. It may be even more important, because an issue with the control plane will affect all of the applications and cause potential outages.

We dedicate a lot of space in our blog to the topic of monitoring. That’s because when you’re managing Kubernetes clusters, things can change quickly. It’s important that you have tools to monitor the health and resource metrics of your clusters. In Rancher 2.5, we introduced a new version of our monitoring based on the Prometheus Operator, which provides Kubernetes-native deployment and management of Prometheus and related monitoring components.