Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today, most organizations, large or small, are hosting their SaaS application on the cloud using multi-tenant architecture. There are multiple reasons for this, but the most simple and straightforward reasons are cost and scalability. In a multi-tenant architecture, one instance of a software application is shared by multiple tenants (clients).

While developing Docker images for Icinga 2, Icinga Web 2 and Icinga DB we stumbled over OpenShift which doesn’t allow images to run as root by default. One has to enable that explicitly. Also admins of K8s environments being more permissive by default may decide not to allow running as the superuser. So we’ve added a USER directive to our Dockerfiles to make our customers‘ compliance departments happy.

The most common problems and outages in a Kubernetes cluster come from coreDNS, so learning how to monitor coreDNS is crucial. Imagine that your frontend application suddenly goes down. After some time investigating, you discover it’s not resolving the backend endpoint because the DNS keeps returning 500 error codes. The sooner you can get to this conclusion, the faster you can recover your application.

Should application developers learn Kubernetes? Let’s ask an even deeper question; should application developers even be aware of Kubernetes in their infrastructure? I frequently hear this question being asked by DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Development teams. Of course, this is a discussion that brings very different views from different people and can result in a very long debate.

In a previous article, we discussed why we frequently hear that developers are not that keen on Kubernetes. You can read it here. In summary, while developers certainly see the value of Kubernetes, they want to continue focusing on their application code and updates and not be impacted by the company’s Kubernetes initiative, which is quite fair.

According to leading independent researchers teknowlogy | PAC, open source platforms – and Kubernetes in particular – are central to the future of digital factories. The PAC RADAR report offers a detailed market analysis of industrial digitalisation trends, and it predicts that Kubernetes-based platforms that bring together edge and cloud technologies will soon dominate the digital factory landscape.