Bjoern Brundert

VMware Project Pacific – collection of materials

by

Blogposts:

VMworld US 2019:

VMworld Europe 2019 sessions:

  • HBI1452BE – Project Pacific: Supervisor Cluster Deep Dive – STREAM DOWNLOAD
  • HBI1761BE – Project Pacific 101: The Future of vSphere – STREAM DOWNLOAD
  • HBI4500BE – Project Pacific: Guest Clusters Deep Dive – STREAM DOWNLOAD
  • HBI4501BE – Project Pacific: Native Pods Deep Dive – STREAM DOWNLOAD
  • HBI4937BE – Introducing Project Pacific: Transforming vSphere into the App Platform of the Future – STREAM DOWNLOAD
  • KUB1840BE – Run Kubernetes Consistently Across Clouds with Tanzu & Project Pacific – STREAM DOWNLOAD
  • KUB1851BE – Managing Clusters: Project Pacific on vSphere & Tanzu Mission Control – STREAM DOWNLOAD

Podcasts:

Labs / Hands-On:

  • HOL-2013-01-SDC – Project Pacific – Lightning Lab: https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/lab/6877

Other interesting sources:

Feel free to reach out if you are missing any interesting sessions here – happy to update this post anytime! @bbrundert

2019-05-30 – Cloud Native Short Takes

by

KubeCon + CloudNativecon Barcelona 2019 & related announcements

Other community updates

Deploying kubeapps helm chart on VMware Enterprise PKS (lab deployment!)

by

With the recent announcement of VMware and Bitnami joining forces, I wanted to revisit the kubeapps project on Enterprise PKS earlier today. I followed the community documentation but ran into some smaller issues (see my GitHub comments here) that were coming up in the MongoDB deployment initially.

UPDATE: At first I thought you needed to enable privileged containers in PKS but actually you don’t have to do that! There was a typo in my configuration which led to an unknown flag for the MongoDB deployment. I used the flag “mongodb.securityContext.enable=false” when deploying the Helm chart but it should have been “mongodb.securityContext.enabled=false”. Thanks to Andres from the Bitnami team for catching this! The instructions below have been updated!

Install Helm

Add the bitnami repo: 

helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami

Add a “kubeapps” namespace to deploy into

kubectl create namespace kubeapps

Add a Service Account to Tiller 

vi rbac-config-tiller.yaml
---
apiVersion: v1
 kind: ServiceAccount
 metadata:
   name: tiller
   namespace: kube-system
 apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
 kind: ClusterRoleBinding
 metadata:
   name: tiller
 roleRef:
   apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
   kind: ClusterRole
   name: cluster-admin
 subjects:
 kind: ServiceAccount
 name: tiller
 namespace: kube-system 
---
kubectl create -f rbac-config-tiller.yaml

Leverage newly created service account for Tiller: 

helm init --service-account tiller

Create Service account for kubeapps-operator 

kubectl create serviceaccount kubeapps-operator 

kubectl create clusterrolebinding kubeapps-operator \
--clusterrole=cluster-admin \
--serviceaccount=default:kubeapps-operator

kubectl get secret $(kubectl get serviceaccount kubeapps-operator -o jsonpath='{.secrets[].name}') -o jsonpath='{.data.token}' | base64 --decode

Copy the secret for use in the kubeapps dashboard later on.

Since NSX-T brings an out-of-the-box capability for exposing kubeapps to an external IP address, we can use LoadBalancer and skip the port-forwarding section of the documentation. Following what I found in another bug, I set some extra flags for disabling IPv6:

helm install --name kubeapps --namespace kubeapps bitnami/kubeapps \
--set frontend.service.type=LoadBalancer \
--set mongodb.securityContext.enabled=false \
--set mongodb.mongodbEnableIPv6=false

After a few minutes, the deployed services & deployments should be up and running:

Follow then part three of the instructions to access the dashboard.

2019-05-13 – Cloud Native Short Takes

by

Hello everyone and welcome to my first Cloud Native Short Take. Following the spirit from my previous efforts, I’d like to share some interesting links and observations that I came across recently. So, lets get right into it:

  • Red Hat Summit carried some interesting updates for customers that run OpenShift on VMware today or plan to do it in the future. There was a joint announcement of a reference architecture for OpenShift on the VMware SDDC. Read more about it on the VMware Office of the CTO Blog, the VMware vSphere Blog as well as the Red Hat Blog.
  • Speaking of announcements, GitHub just announced “GitHub Package Registry” – a new service that will users allow to bring their packages right to their code. As GitHub puts it: “GitHub Package Registry is a software package hosting service, similar to npmjs.org, rubygems.org, or hub.docker.com, that allows you to host your packages and code in one place. “
  • My friends at Wavefront launched a new capability around observability in microservices land. Check out their blogpost around Service Maps in their Wavefront 3D Observability offering that combines metrics, distributed tracing and histograms. There is also a pretty cool demo on Youtube linked from that post – it’s beautiful!
  • Following the motto “Kubernetes, PKS, and Cloud Automation Services – Better Together!”, the VMware Cloud Automation Services team released a beta integration with Enterprise PKS. Read more about it on their blog and watch the webinar for more details.
  • My friend Cormac is a fantastic resource in all-things cloud-native storage these days. And thankfully, he shares lots of his own discoveries on his blog. His latest post is focused on testing Portworx’ STORK for doing K8s volume snapshots in an on-prem vSphere environment. Read more about it here. Looking forward to the next post which will include some integration testing with Velero.
  • Speaking of Velero (formerly known as Ark), this project is heading to a version 1.0 release! I am very excited for the team! You can find the first Release Candidate here.
  • And coming back to Cormac’s blog – he just released a “Getting started with Velero 1.0-RC1” blogpost with his test deployment running Cassandra on PKS on vSphere (leveraging Restic).
  • The Kubernetes 1.15 enhancement tracking is now locked down. You can find the document on Google Docs
  • I came across an interesting talk on InfoQ titled “The Life of a Packet through Istio”
  • Another interesting announcement came from Red Hat and Microsoft around a project called KEDA. KEDA “allows for fine grained autoscaling (including to/from zero) for event driven Kubernetes workloads. KEDA serves as a Kubernetes Metrics Server and allows users to define autoscaling rules using a dedicated Kubernetes custom resource definition”. A very interesting project, check out the blogpost and a TGIK episode from Kris Nóva last Friday.
  • There is some useful material around the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam in this little study guide
  • Oh and speaking of enablement: I can only recommend you check out the freshly published book “Cloud Native Patterns” by the amazing Cornelia Davis on Manning.com. I have been following the development of that book via the “MEAP” program and it’s a pretty great source of information!
  • Several thoughts on choosing the right Serverless Platform

Restarting “CNA Weekly” as “Cloud Native Short Takes” & shutting down the newsletter

by

First of all, I’d like to thank all of you very much for your interest in my “CNA weekly”.
As you might have noticed, I haven’t shared any updates recently. That’s not because there aren’t any news, it’s more related to the format.

After reconsidering various options, I decided to delete my tinyletter account and continue (actually restart) my efforts on my blog at http://bit.ly/cna-shorttakes. You can subscribe via RSS (http://blog.think-v.com/?feed=rss2) e.g. via feedly (if you don’t know it, check it out!) or follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/bbrundert). Other options to continue receiving the content via email include RSS-to-email services like Blogtrottr or IFTTT. 

Thanks again to all of you! 

Take care,
Bjoern