CNA weekly #006

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 OverviewPKS ClientNSX-TOps Manager and BOSHPKS Control PlaneKubernetes 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

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

Happy Monday everyone!

Pivotal Container Service

vSphere Integrated Containers

Platform Reliability Engineering & Operations

Function-as-a-Service

Interesting industry updates

CNA weekly #003

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

“All-things Cloud-Native” Newsletter

Last week I started a small experiment that I have been thinking about for some time now: a newsletter about all-things “Cloud-Native”. I have been using Twitter and RSS/feedly for quite some time now to keep up with my favorite areas of technology. But it’s tough – there is just too much going on. Some people asked me how I keep up with all these fast-moving topics and news and also stay engaged e.g. on Twitter. In essence, I made this part of my daily routine and I keep improving that practice each day. I also found inspiration on some other newsletters that I started to find useful for myself (e.g. cron.weekly or devops weekly) – in a world of literally 1000s new updates per day, a solid newsletter can be quite valuable.

Over the past years I already captured content from various channels that I found useful and shared that in a structured manner with my customers. But I feel there might be value in this – now laser focused on Cloud-Native – even for people outside of my direct network. So I decided to formalize it even further and offer my very personal summary of highlights from the week in a newsletter. From a tool perspective I picked tinyletter because it feels like there isn’t much overhead for the sender, it has a clean interface and a pretty straight-forward archive option.