Like thousands of others in businesses around the world, you’ve kicked the tires on K8s and decided that it’s worth committing to, at least enough to justify the cost of a week in SLC. You’re on site to scope out technologies and vendors and learn best practices as you put Kubernetes into production in some shape or form.

So here’s the no-nonsense advice you need to make your next 12 months hurt less.

1. DIY does not work at scale

If you’re serious about Kubernetes, the data says you will end up with tens or hundreds of clusters. You need them to look and behave the same, consistently, otherwise you’ll drive yourself mad with troubleshooting and policy violations. You need the ability to stand a new cluster up for a new requirement in minutes, not weeks, or you’ll be very unpopular with your app dev teams.

We all love rolling up our sleeves and tinkering, and when you were learning K8s principles and building your first cluster (‘the hard way’ or not), that’s the right way to do it. You’re in there, writing scripts, wrangling kubectl, tweaking yaml.

But DIY does not scale.

Yes, there are companies out there that rolled their own Kubernetes ‘management platform’ over the past six or seven years, and got it working pretty well. If you asked them over a beer what they’d do if they were starting afresh today, most of them would do it differently. They would look for an easy way.

Learn from them: you need repeatable templates and push-button automation, but it probably doesn’t make sense to DIY your own tooling to do that.

2. Building the cluster is the easy bit

K8s beginners naturally focus on getting their first clusters up and running, and the end goal is seeing their handful of nodes in a ‘ready’ state. Yes, it’s challenging — but believe it or not, it’s the easy bit. 

Now you’ve got to build the rest of the enterprise-grade stack, everything from load balancers to secrets management, logging and observability. In meme parlance, it’s “the rest of the ****ing owl”. 

Oh, and you need to patch, upgrade, scale, reconfigure, secure, monitor and troubleshoot that full stack. At scale. Frequently. Forever.

Unless you are blessed with unlimited headcount or very patient internal customers, you probably need to look at automation for this part, too. You’re not looking for a build tool — you’re looking for fleet lifecycle management.

One of our customers is well on their journey to enterprise-wide Kubernetes, primarily on-prem, and in a highly regulated industry. Last week we interviewed him (on condition of anonymity) about his journey, and he explained how this realization hit him, too:

“I didn’t know what my team size was going to be, and at that point it was just me, and I wasn’t going to go around manually building 60 clusters or 600 clusters. There’s no way I could do that. I’d be spending all my time doing it. 

“If we’re going to do this and be able to reliably create clusters the same way at scale, we cannot be doing it by hand. So I wanted to build a platform that was mostly automated. 

“We need not only automation to create the clusters, but we also need to make sure that they’re maintained and updated. Someone’s got to sit in the chair for hours and do that. And that’s what led us down the path of trying to find an enterprise container management solution.”

3. Prepare for your future, today

For a decade now, Kubernetes has been surprising us all with its versatility and extensibility, with custom resources and operators and the power of the K8s API. 

You may have just a few mainstream use cases today, likely self-service ‘Kubernetes as a Service’ (KaaS) in the cloud or virtualized data center. But who knows what the future holds for K8s in your business? 

• Maybe you’ll start looking to K8s as a way to modernize your VM workloads, as well as orchestrating containers.
• Perhaps your environment needs will change: if you need to deploy clusters at the edge, on bare metal, in different clouds — can your current toolset do it? 
• And what happens if one of your favored projects, Linux OSs or distributions changes license or gets abandoned — how hard is it to swap out?

You can’t predict the future, but you can certainly prepare for it: protecting your agency and freedom of choice.

So make your tech stack decisions today to protect the freedom of ‘future you’. Watch out for highly opinionated services and toolsets that will lock you in. But equally, remember that DIY won’t be the easy answer in any of these situations.

Don’t be afraid to follow your unique journey

We work with dozens and dozens of enterprises, from defense contractors to pharma manufacturers, small software vendors to the biggest telcos. Every one of them has the same basic pains — they need to make it safe and easy to design, deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters to run enterprise applications. But every one of them is also unique!

Some are running small form-factor edge devices in airgapped environments with high security. Some are spinning up clusters in the cloud for dev teams. Some have crazy network setups and proxies, or complex integrations with existing tooling like ServiceNow and enterprise identity providers. Some have big, highly expert teams, others just have one or two people working on Kubernetes.

So when you’re standing in the hall with thousands of other K8s enthusiasts, don’t get swept away by the cool stuff. Look for those that can help you navigate your own, unique path to business results. And enjoy the ride!

To learn more about Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem, join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, in Salt Lake City, Utah, on November 12-15, 2024.

The post Speedrunning Kubernetes in the enterprise appeared first on SD Times.

First, the company announced the general availability of Red Hat Device Edge, which was created to provide a platform for deploying devices at the edge. It includes an operating system optimized for the edge and a supported distribution of the lightweight Kubernetes project MicroShift, providing customers with two deployment options.

According to Red Hat, other benefits include a minimal footprint, a consistent operational experience, workload flexibility, and simplified deployment.  

Next, it released Red Hat OpenShift 4.14. The latest version includes the general availability of hosted control planes, which reduces management costs, improves cluster provisioning time, helps overcome limitations due to cluster scale, and decouples control planes from workloads for greater security. Red Hat claims that hosted control planes can save 30% in infrastructure costs and 60% in developer time. 

Other capabilities include the ability to run virtual machines and containers side by side using Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, support for NVIDIA GPU accelerators, and the availability of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Marketplace. 

The company also revealed it has donated five new plugins to Backstage, which is a framework for building developer portals. The technologies that correspond to the new plugins include Azure Container Registry, JFrog Artifactory, Kiali, Nexus, and 3scale. 

This isn’t the first time Red Hat has contributed to the Backstage community. In 2022, the company first joined that community and then donated five plugins back in May of this year. Those plugins include Application Topology for Kubernetes, Multi Cluster View with Open Cluster Management, Container Image Registry for Quay, Pipelines with Tekton, and Authentication and Authorization with Keycloak. 

“We believe the future of developer productivity depends on the continued evolution and innovation of projects like Backstage, and we’re focused on making this future a reality through contributions that help simplify, extend and accelerate the development process,” said Balaji Sivasubramanian, senior director of Developer Tools Product Management at Red Hat. “Donating these plug-ins to the Backstage community is a reflection of Red Hat’s commitment to helping developers meet the demands of today as they innovate for tomorrow.”

 Finally, Red Hat launched Ansible Inside, which allows developers to embed Ansible Playbooks inside their applications. According to the company, this offering was built for customers who want to embed automation in their applications, but don’t require all of the capabilities offered by Ansible Automation Platform.

The post Red Hat releases Red Hat Device Edge, OpenShift 4.14, and donates new Backstage plugins to open-source community appeared first on SD Times.

Hazelcast announces new data streaming capabilities

Hazelcast today announced new capabilities that aim to enable enterprises to join several streams of live data as well as merge them with large volumes of stored data in order to provide teams with historical context from a single data processing platform.

Additionally, the Hazelcast Platform has introduced zero-code connectors which are intended to accelerate how quickly an enterprise realizes the benefits of stream processing and real-time applications.

These new capabilities include stream-to-stream join functionality,  the democratization of querying via a zero-code connector, and a tiered storage function 

DataStax introduces Stargate V2 

The real-time data company DataStax has introduced Stargate V2, a new version of its open-source data gateway. According to DataStax, the latest version of Stargate features a high-performance gRPC API that allows developers to scale Cassandra data to serve billions of global devices with speed in real time. 

Key elements of Stargate V2 include development simplicity, operational scalability, and extensibility. 

“We’re a global team, with clients and offices located across 6 continents,” said Deepak Kumar, VP of engineering at SHIELD. “DataStax’s Astra DB provides an ideal managed Cassandra database service to underpin our fraud library of 7 billion devices and 1 billion user accounts with speed and scale. When we needed a strong Go driver to fit our development framework, we turned to the Stargate gRPC API. It’s high performing and easy to use, which empowered us to continually prove cutting edge AI and device fingerprinting technologies to stop fraud.”

Cloud Foundry Foundation announces new Governing Board Chair and Opens Project Roadmaps

Cloud Foundry announced today that Catherine McGarvey, vice president of software engineering, VMware, has been named the new chair of its Governing Board. The Cloud Foundry Foundation Governing Board is responsible for managing the Foundation’s business affairs, property, and interests.

With this, the Foundation has also made its roadmaps public for the first time in order to provide transparency for open-source projects and help engineering teams plan their feature development.

Honeycomb launches new Service Map 

The team at the observability platform Honeycomb today announced the launch of Service Map as well as enhancements to the platform’s machine analysis tool, BubbleUp. These innovations are intended to offer ease and speed to developers so that they can better understand and debug their data.

According to the company, Honeycomb’s Service Map solves the limitations of existing Service Maps that only show the topology of services and their relationships, creating the need for other tools to investigate and debug.

The new Service Map comes as an interactive and visual debugging tool with the ability to be filtered by several dimensions, allowing users to view the relationships between all services for specific classes of users, usage scenarios, or conditions.

The post KubeCon 2022: Hazelcast announces new data streaming capabilities, DataStax introduces Stargate V2, Cloud Foundry Foundation announces new Governing Board Chair and Opens Project Roadmaps, and more appeared first on SD Times.

She began her talk by applauding the ways in which the community has continued to thrive despite the tumultuous nature of the last few years.

“Both the humans and the technology have shown incredible resilience,” Sharma said. “That resilience has been reflected in our numbers, which keep climbing up… And today, we are at 176,362 contributors worldwide.”

Her talk focused heavily on the importance of maintainers in the Kubernetes space and the ways in which their contributions and time sacrifices are essential to the success of the billion dollar companies that they work for.

Sharma welcomed Yuan Tang, maintainer of Argo and founding engineer at Akuity, and Heba Elayoty, bug triage lead for Kubernetes release 1.25, multiple SIG contributor, main maintainer of Virtual Kubelet, and software engineer at Microsoft to the stage in order to dive deeper into the knowledge maintainers can share with the community.

They discussed topics such as a maintainer’s key challenges, how to solve them, how CNCF has been helpful throughout their journeys, and how organizations can better support their maintainers.

Sharma explained that one way CNCF is helping to support maintainers is through the company’s new initiative to strengthen digital safety.

“Starting today, all maintainers will have access to a platform called Tall Poppy which is a digital safety platform that will help them secure their online presence and avoid needless harassment and bullying,” she said.

Additionally, Sharma mentioned ContribFest, an event taking place at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2022 that allows participants to hack on projects, get the help that they need, and assist maintainers.

She also explained that no company on CNCF’s governing board has any plans to cut back on upstream commitments, stating that several of them have gone above and beyond in their efforts.

The post KubeCon Keynote Address stresses the importance of supporting maintainers and upstream commitments appeared first on SD Times.

First, it announced that it welcomed the decentralized package network, Pyrsia, into the foundation as an incubating project. Pyrsia was developed by JFrog and it can be used to secure software supply chains by creating a system where there is transparency in package sources. In addition, the distribution of artifacts can be done by anyone instead of just relying on a central place. 

The CDF has stated that it will work to ensure that the project represents interests from different technology companies, cloud providers, and more. It will also foster collaboration across projects like Tekton and CDEvents and collaboration from other groups within the CDF. 

Second, the foundation announced the graduation of Tekton, which is a framework for creating CI/CD systems.

Graduation of a project indicates that it has met certain growth requirements and can now be self-sustaining in terms of development, maintenance, and long-term support. 

And finally, the CDF announced version 0.1 of the CDEvents project, which the foundation recently began hosting. This release introduces versioned schemas for events, CloudEvents binding to support out-of-the-box transport, and SDKs in Golang and Python. The maintainers are also working on a Java SDK. 

“Interoperability and Supply Chain Security are the keys to the growth of the modern Software Delivery ecosystem. The Continuous Delivery Foundation is making great progress this year towards these goals: Project Pyrsia brings package delivery to our ecosystem. Tekton shows great adoption and wide collaboration in the industry, and its graduated status is well deserved,” said Oleg Nenashev, CDF TOC Chair, senior director at the Dynatrace OSPO, and Jenkins and Keptn maintainer. “Shortly, the CDEvents standard should boost interoperability between projects, and I’m happy to see so many multi-tool presentations at the CD Summit. Thanks to all member organizations and individual contributors that help us to move forward!”

The post Continuous Delivery Foundation announces incubation of Pyrsia, graduation of Tekton appeared first on SD Times.

The drivers are, by now, familiar: Cloud, IoT and 5G have increased the amount of data generated by – and flowing through – organizations. They have also accelerated the pace of business, with organizations rolling out new services and deploying software faster than ever. 

Spending on data analytics has been growing as a result – by around a third year-on-year across all sectors, as those in charge of operations attempt to make sense of this data. They want to take effective decisions in real time in response to changing events and market conditions. This has been accelerated due to technology disruptors, both large and small, driving a new normal of more intelligent applications and experiences.

We are therefore experiencing a burgeoning renaissance in streaming technologies – from data-flow management to distributed messaging and stream processing, and more. 

To hear more about cloud native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the cloud native community at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 in Detroit (and virtual) from October 24-28.

Read the full story here on ITOps.com.

The post Beyond batch: Real-time business is a continuous event appeared first on SD Times.

Ahead of the conference, the foundation announced the general availability of containerd 1.0. Containerd is Docker’s core container runtime it donated to the CNCF in March. Initially, containerd included methods for transferring container images, container execution and supervision, low-level local storage and network interfaces, and the ability to work on Linux, Windows and other platforms. Since then, the foundation has added a completely storage and distribution system to support OCI and Docker image formats, improved the events system, and provided a snapshot model to manage container filesystems.

“In 2017, key functionality has been added containerd to address the needs of modern container platforms like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes,” said Michael Crosby, maintainer for containerd and engineer at Docker. “Since our announcement in December, we have been progressing the design of the project with the goal of making it easily embeddable in higher level systems to provide core container capabilities. We will continue to work with the community to create a runtime that’s lightweight yet powerful, balancing new functionality with the desire for code that is easy to support and maintain.”

Fluentd, an open source data collector for unified logging layer, reached 1.0 this week with multiprocess workers, sub-second time resolution, Windows support, new plugins API, data management and networking features. Going forward, Fluentd will be updated with performance improvements and connectors. “Fluentd was born to solve Logging problems as a whole, not only for standalone applications but also for distributed architectures where each running application and system have their own way to solve logging, integration between all components and the ability to move data from one place to another in a secure and reliable way was a requirement from day one… and it continue to be as of today,” CNCF wrote in a blog post.

Lastly, Jaeger 1.0 was released. Jaeger is a open source distributed tracing system from Uber, used to monitor complex, microservices-based architectures. The latest version improves the Jaeger UI, provides better navigation, has Prometheus as the default metrics system integration, includes the early version of the C++ client, and is backwards compatible with Zipkin.

“Even though we are proud of the functionality we are releasing in v1.0, we are even more excited about the next generation features we are currently working on. Jaeger is a great tool if you want to look at individual traces and investigate performance issues, but individual traces are a tiny portion of the of the overall knowledge that can be gained from tracing data,” the foundation wrote. “Thus our top priority are the features that support aggregations, analytics, and data mining, tools on top of Jaeger platform that allow gathering insights about the whole architecture at large.”

In addition, the CNCF released the findings of its community survey designed to provide more insight into the landscape of cloud native technologies. The survey found Kubernetes is the top container orchestration tool of choice with Google Container Engine, Amazon ECS and Rancher following behind. In addition, OpenStack’s role in the container space is evolving, and Kubernetes continues to move from development to production.

The full results can be found here.

The post KubeCon + CloudNativeCon: containerd 1.0, Fluentd 1.0 and Jaeger 1.0 appeared first on SD Times.