Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It's easy to get lost in today's continuously changing landscape of cloud native technologies. The learning curve from a beginner's perspective is quite steep, and without proper context it becomes increasingly difficult to sift through all the buzzwords. If you have been developing software, chances are you may have heard of Kubernetes by now. Before we jump into what Kubernetes is, it's essential to familiarize ourselves with containerization and how it came about.

The enterprise Kubernetes management space has definitely become a lot more crowded over the past two years as traditional vendors and startups alike attempt to grab a slice of this massive market. The increasingly competitive vendor landscape makes Forrester’s recent recognition of Rancher Labs that much more meaningful.

We have come a long way in the world of computing. From having computers that fill up entire rooms or buildings while performing relatively basic actions to having complex machines that literally fit in our pockets and palms, this advancement has been nothing short of breathless. With an emphasis placed on speed and efficiency, computers and the applications running on these computers have been tailored to ensure optimal use of resources, be these resources hardware or software resources.

A headline in a recent Register article jumped off my screen with the claim: “No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too.” Well, that certainly got my attention…for a couple of reasons. First, the emphasis on an absolute claim was quite literally shouting at me. In my experience, absolutes are rare occurrences in software engineering. Second, it was nearly impossible to imagine what evidence this conclusion was based on.

A few days ago, our team released Calico v3.16. As part of that release, we have marked the eBPF dataplane as “GA”, signalling that it is now stable and ready for wider use by the community. In this blog post I want to take you through the process of moving from tech-preview to GA.

Deploying Docker images to Kubernetes is a great way to run your application in an easily scalable way. Getting started with your first Kubernetes deployment can be a little daunting if you are new to Docker and Kubernetes, but with a little bit of preparation, your application will be running in no time. In this blog post, we will cover the basic steps needed to build Docker images and deploy them to a Kubernetes cluster.

Look out for these Kubernetes monitoring best practices when evaluating a Kubernetes monitoring solution. It will be easier to make sense of them if your tools are Kubernetes native. Let’s face it. Running containers in Kubernetes brings a number of advantages in terms of automation, segmentation, and efficiency. However, the ability to monitor performance and availability in an ever-changing infrastructure like Kubernetes can be a challenge.

Tigera serves the networking and policy enforcement needs of more than 150,000 Kubernetes clusters across the globe and supports two product lines: open source Calico, and Calico Enterprise. Our development team is constantly running smoke, system, unit, and functional verification tests, as well as all our E2Es for these products. Our CI pipelines form an extremely important aspect of the overall IT infrastructure and enable us to test our products and catch bugs before release.

Keeping track of what’s going on in Kubernetes isn’t easy. It’s an environment where things move quickly, individual containers come and go, and a large number of independent processes involving separate users may all be happening at the same time. Container-based systems are by their nature optimized for rapid, efficient response to a heavy load of requests from multiple users in a highly abstracted environment and not for high-visibility, real-time monitoring.