Cloud Native Short Takes

This category will give you regular updates on all-things Cloud-Native from VMware, Kubernetes and the surrounding communities.

2019-05-30 – Cloud Native Short Takes

by

KubeCon + CloudNativecon Barcelona 2019 & related announcements

Other community updates

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

CNA weekly #009

by

The good thing about flight delays and spending time in hotel rooms is that it finally gives me the opportunity to do some long overdue work on the CNA weekly. There are so many things that I want to share in this edition and I hope you’ll find it useful again.

Let me start with a loud shout-out to the global Harbor community. I am so extremely happy to see this great open source project receiving some well-deserved recognition: Harbor joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and is now the newest adopted sandbox project!

As many of you know, besides its highly successful existance in the Open Source community, Harbor is also an important piece in VMware’s Cloud-Native Applications efforts, specifically in vSphere Integrated Containers as well as Pivotal Container Service. Both of them saw several updates since the last edition of the weekly: PKS 1.1 is now available (incl. K8s 1.10, Multi Availabilty Zone Support, Multi-Master in beta, …) and VIC 1.4 has also been released. Check out the sections below for more details and links to the downloads.

But wait, there is more: VMware also announced a new cloud service called VMware Kubernetes Engine (VKE). VKE will be a multi-cloud managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering with some pretty unique features like the “Smart Cluster” implementation that picks the optimal instance types for your k8s cluster and much more. Right now it is built natively on AWS but it’ll head to Azure as well – but you can manage it with the same set of policies! Learn more about VKE in the links below – and you can also sign up for the beta there.

Another topic that is very close to my heart: how do you want to run your containers and platforms? When I started my career in IT in a large organization, I quickly learned the value and benefits that virtualization brings not only to the consumers but also to the operators of the infrastructure. And running containers is no exception here. Make sure to look into a great new whitepaper (“Containers on Bare-Metal or Virtual Machines?“) and look out for a must-watch VMworld 2018 session presented by Michael Gasch and Frank Denneman.

But let’s move on to some content:

Open Source & Community updates

Harbor

Pivotal Container Service (PKS)

VMware Kubernetes Engine

vSphere Integrated Containers

Function-as-a-Service & Serverless

Platform Reliability Engineering & Operations

Other news from VMware

Keeping it fun

CNA weekly #008

by

Hello everyone,

After some pretty excting weeks, I am finally back with a new edition of my CNA weekly. I had the pleasure to attend KubeCon in Copenhagen and I am still amazed by all the great sessions & collaborative culture across the event. I had so many energizing conversations and can only confirm the observations that my colleague Tim shared in his blogpost about the “hallway track“. 

 

vSphere Integrated Containers

Pivotal Container Service

Open Source

KubeCon 2018 

Other News