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

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KubeCon + CloudNativecon Barcelona 2019 & related announcements

Other community updates

2019-05-13 – Cloud Native Short Takes

von

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

von

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

von

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

von

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

CNA weekly #007

von

Hello everyone, 

Wow – what an exciting time! While I am super energized about all the news in cloud-native land, I always love to see a new generation of VMware’s core stack being released. All hypervisor and management software (vSphere) got a significant update and there are tons of highly interesting updates that could also impact cloud-native platforms running on top of it. Just check out e.g. VMFork that is now part of the core hypervisor in version 6.7 and imagine the possibilities. What is VMFork you ask? VMFork enables „forking“ instances of a live, powered-on VM, each with its own unique identity. By leveraging the existing linked-clone technology for disks and extending the hypervisor to enable Copy-on-Write memory and VM state, VMFork fosters instant creation of VMs with little CPU overhead. William Lam already blogged about some examples as well.

But I am just scratching the surface here – learn more about the updates from the linked blogposts below… and now into the content!

The world is gathering in Hannover/Germany this week for the Hannover Messe to discuss Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation across industries. VMware is showcasing some of the solutions at the edge and IoT space as well – find out more in the video on Hannover Messe’s website.

My great colleague Tom Scanlan worked on a slightly smaller IoT & Kubernetes usecase and released a new blog article titled „Winery Application Demo: IoT Pipeline with Kubernetes on vSphere“ – great read!

As I mentioned on a previous edition of my updates, there is now a dedicated Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Kubernetes Community that is focussed on VMware. Our colleagues outlined more about the structure, purpose and how to engage with the SIG in a recent blog article. 

William Lam keeps blogging about Pivotal Container Service. This week it’s about a Monitoring Tool Overview – by the way: the Wavefront team also released a blog article on Develop Cloud-Native Applications, Leave the Heavy Lifting of Monitoring to Wavefront which also includes a pretty cool 8 minute demo!

Besides William’s excellent series, my colleague Cormac Hogan also shared a great blogpost around a very simple Pivotal Container Service deployment. 

There is now also a free new ebook on „Accelerating Digital Transformation with Containers and Kubernetes“ available from VMware. The book „introduces you to containers and Kubernetes, explains their business value, explores their use cases, and illuminates how they can accelerate your organization’s digital transformation„.

KubeCon is just around the corner. Make sure to add  The NewStack Pancake Breakfast & Podcast: Securing Kubernetes to your schedule! Please reach out if you are attending KubeCon – VMware is a Diamond Sponsor this year and we will have a presence there as well! 

 

Some additional news and updates:

https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2018/04/all-vsphere-6-7-release-notes-download-links.html

https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2018/04/new-vsphere-6-7-apis-worth-checking-out.html

https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2018/04/new-instant-clone-architecture-in-vsphere-6-7-part-1.html

CNA weekly #006

von

Happy Monday everyone!

Another exciting week has passed and I had several great meetings across the region. And I love my new PKS socks – socks are the new stickers 😉

But lets take a look at some of the content from last week:

William Lam (@lamw) has continued his work on the Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blogpost series with a seventh part about the integration with the container registry Harbor (after Overview, PKS Client, NSX-T, Ops Manager and BOSH, PKS Control Plane, Kubernetes Go!)

Pivotal Container Service (PKS) 1.0.2 has been released last week. It includes a minor update to K8s 1.9.5 and several enhancements, find out more in the Download and Release Notes 

Speaking of PKS: there will be a PKS roadshow across the US and then coming to cities across Europe very soon. Make sure to sign-up here if you are interested in learning more. I’ll publish additional dates as soon as they are releases. 

At the same time, NSX-T and the NSX Container Plugin (NCP) have been released in version 2.1.2. NSX-T now supports Kubernetes 1.10.

Speaking of NSX-T: the team just released a Terraform provider for NSX-T and demonstrates its capabilities in a 20min video focused on Infrastructure as Code with NSX-T. 

vRealize Automation 7.4 has been released! There are many great updates listed on the Overview Blogpost but you can also find out more in the Download and Release Notes

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) has been embedded in VMware’s core virtualization product for over a decade and VMware customer are leveraging its algorithms to let the infrastructure load-balance itself in a „driverless“ fashion. A newly released whitepaper gives some insights into what’s new and what’s current with vSphere 6.5’s implementation of DRS and explains many of the concepts and metrics in more detail. 

I somehow missed the release of a great whitepaper titled „Performance of Enterprise Web Applications in Docker Containers on VMware vSphere 6.5„.

Dispatch Framework 0.1.11 has been released as well – „Lots of new stuff including open service broker support for services and language packs to easily expand supported language runtimes.“

An interesting perspective and findings from reality are included in the blogpost called „Another reason why your Docker containers may be slow“. Quoting the article: „It re-iterates on the fact that containerization != virtualization and demonstrates how containerized processes can compete for resources even if all cgroup limits are set to reasonable values, and there’s plenty of computing power available on the host machine.“

CNA weekly #005

von
Welcome back to another edition of the CNA weekly! Sorry for the slight delay with this edition – I am still aiming for a weekly cadence. But lets kick-off this Monday with some fresh content!
 
First of all, I’d like to point you to a must-read series for everyone that is interested in Kubernetes by VMware: Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) blogposts by my friend William Lam (@lamw):

William also summarizes his work in a tweet:

Just recently, Kubernetes 1.10 has been released. Read more about it by my (new) colleagues Clint and Vladimir in their blogpost here. Find out more on the official K8s blog here.

Are you planning to attend KubeCon in Copenhagen in May? Are you interested in getting involved in VMware & Kubernetes? Join the VMware SIG (Special Interest Group) meeting on Thursday, May 3 from 11:55 – 12:30! The SIG site can be found here. 

From the series „back to basics„: vSphere HA Restart Priority – another great blogpost from my colleague Duncan. Make sure to get the configuration for you cluster management and worker VMs right!

From our friends at the VMware User Group (VMUG) there is a „Containers 101 for the vSphere Admin“ session available. Learn more about vSphere Integrated Containers 

The VMware Open Source team shares some thoughts about maintaining large open source projects as well as five „secret“ practices for Open Source success.

Some great news for Platform Operators: vRealize Operations & Wavefront are getting a close integration as part of the vROps 6.7 release. Read more about the integration here.

My colleague Alex Ellis has recently written an interesting blogpost about how to move your project to Kubernetes – he is sharing is learnings from the OpenFaaS community from the past 12 months.

Are you designing or thinking about building Kubernetes and are you willing to share some of your thoughts? Check out this survey…

CNA weekly #004

von

Happy Monday everyone!

Pivotal Container Service

vSphere Integrated Containers

Platform Reliability Engineering & Operations

Function-as-a-Service

Interesting industry updates

CNA weekly #003

von

Wow – I had no idea this newsletter idea would become so popular so soon. Thanks everyone for signing up! I want to keep this as interesting as possible. Feel free to forward this newsletter to your friends and colleagues. And please send feedback or ideas anytime – I am always open for suggestions (e.g. via Twitter @bbrundert).

Pivotal Container Service
In case you missed it last week: Pivotal Container Service is now generally available. Check out these blogposts that capture some of the highlights:

Here is the download link for Pivotal Container Service (PKS) on Pivotal Network. You need to create an account to get to the download bits. Documentation can be found here. 

VMware Cloud Native Applications and Platform News

 
Kubernetes / Container Ecosystem