CloudPro #50: 10 Years of Kubernetes
50 issues of CloudPro!!!
Welcome to the 50th edition of CloudPro!!!! So glad to have you on this special milestone! Today, we’ll talk about:
Masterclass:
Enhancing Kubernetes workload isolation and security using Kata Containers
Conquering Multi-Cluster Kubernetes with Centralized Add-on Management
How to Implement Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling for Scalable Applications
Secret Knowledge:
Techwave:
HackHub: Best Tools for the Cloud
Cheers,
Editor-in-Chief
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MasterClass: Tutorials & Guides
Update multiple Kubernetes objects/configmaps in one go
To update multiple Kubernetes configmaps efficiently, use the `kubectl patch` command. For a large number of updates, create a script to automate the process:
List all configmaps to be updated in a file.
Use a script to iterate through the list and apply the same update to each configmap.
Log the actions and results for verification.
This method reduces manual effort and minimizes errors when updating many configmaps simultaneously.
Enhancing Kubernetes workload isolation and security using Kata Containers
Containers are widely used to deploy and manage applications because they offer isolation, efficient use of hardware, scalability, and portability. However, for scenarios where strong resource isolation is critical for security, virtual machines (VMs) are often preferred. Kata Containers offer a solution that combines the lightweight nature of containers with the strong isolation provided by VMs.
Kata Containers is an open-source project that provides a secure container runtime. It achieves this by running containers inside lightweight VMs, offering stronger isolation compared to traditional containers. Each Kata Container runs with its own guest operating system, unlike traditional containers that share the host's Linux kernel. This setup enhances security by adding a second layer of defense through hardware virtualization.
Conquering Multi-Cluster Kubernetes with Centralized Add-on Management
Managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across various environments is complex and error-prone when done manually.
Problem with Traditional Management: Manual updates are time-consuming and prone to errors. It is hard to maintain uniform deployments across clusters.
Centralized Solution with Selectors: Unified management offers a single platform to manage all clusters. Selectors use labels to target specific clusters, ensuring consistent deployments.
Sveltos: Cluster Profiles allow admins to create specialized profiles (e.g., security or monitoring) that are applied to relevant clusters. Order and dependencies control deployment order and manage dependencies within profiles. Conflict resolution uses tier values to prioritize configurations and resolve conflicts.
Kubernetes RBAC Permissions You Might Not Know About
Role-based access control (RBAC) is the standard method for managing permissions in Kubernetes (K8s). It uses specific verbs to define what actions are allowed on resources. Among these verbs, three lesser-known but powerful permissions — escalate, bind, and impersonate — can override existing limitations, granting unauthorized access or complete control over a cluster.
Escalate: Allows users to create and edit roles beyond their current permissions, potentially elevating their privileges.
Bind: Enables users to create and edit role bindings, assigning roles with permissions they don’t have.
Impersonate: Lets users assume the identity and privileges of other users, gaining access to resources they wouldn’t normally have.
How to Implement Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaling for Scalable Applications
Choose metrics like CPU or memory usage to trigger scaling actions. You can use default metrics from the Kubernetes Metrics Server or define custom metrics.
Ensure Pods have resource requests set, as HPA uses these to determine scaling actions.
Use kubectl to set up HPA for your deployment, specifying thresholds like CPU percentage, minimum, and maximum Pods.
Test the scaling by generating load on your application and observing the Pod count adjust based on metrics.
Continuously monitor your application's performance and adjust HPA settings as needed for optimal scalability and resource utilization.
Secret Knowledge: Learning Resources
ArgoCD is a GitOps tool for Kubernetes that automates deployment and management processes using Git repositories as the "source of truth." It ensures that the actual state of the infrastructure matches what is described in the Git repository, thus enabling continuous delivery and infrastructure as code practices. It allows for managing multiple clusters, automating application deployment, and implementing advanced features like auto-pruning and self-healing.
Understanding High Cardinality in Observability
High cardinality in observability refers to the vast number of unique combinations that metrics can have, mainly due to various dimensions or attributes attached to them. In cloud-native environments, such as those using microservices architecture, dynamic instances, detailed instrumentation, and user-specific or environment-specific metrics, this cardinality explodes.
This explosion poses challenges like increased query complexity, performance degradation, and higher costs. Traditional solutions struggle to handle this scale efficiently, often resorting to limiting data or using costly workarounds like aggregation, filtering, or sampling.
Observe, a modern observability platform, addresses these challenges by leveraging logs, which can support infinite cardinality. Unlike traditional solutions, Observe retains data for a longer period, providing comprehensive analysis without compromising on performance or cost.
This article discusses best practices for running PostgreSQL databases for SaaS applications on AWS. It covers:
Choosing the right data partitioning and isolation approach.
Developing a solid database scaling strategy, particularly focusing on sharding for SaaS applications.
Managing connections efficiently to avoid performance issues, with a focus on using the RDS Data API for connection management.
Using Azure AD to authenticate to an on-prem Kubernetes cluster
This guide explains how to set up Azure AD as an Identity Provider (IDP) for an on-prem Kubernetes cluster.
Customizing the Backstage Kubernetes plugin
This article introduces Backstage, a platform by Spotify that simplifies application management. It discusses its architecture and Kubernetes plugin, emphasizing customization options to streamline workflows and offer a centralized view of Kubernetes resources. The focus is on customizing the Fetcher module to retrieve data from Kubernetes clusters, enabling access to pods from multiple namespaces, even with security constraints.
TechWave: Cloud News & Analysis
Over the past decade, Kubernetes has grown from a small project to one of the largest open-source initiatives globally, with over 88,000 contributors from 8,000 companies across 44 countries. It emerged from the need to manage complex applications on rapidly advancing hardware. Initially inspired by Google's internal systems, Kubernetes became publicly available in 2014. Since then, it has seen significant developments, including improvements in usability and scalability. Notable milestones include the introduction of Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) in 2017 and the deprecation of Dockershim in 2020. Looking ahead, Kubernetes aims to adapt to emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning, while maintaining sustainability and community involvement. The future of Kubernetes will be shaped by its users, contributors, and evolving ecosystem.
Azure Maps: Location services with cloud + AI
Microsoft is upgrading its mapping services, combining Bing Maps for Enterprise with Azure Maps. This transition offers enhanced features like AI integration, geolocation, weather data, and custom indoor maps. Existing Bing Maps customers have time to switch to Azure Maps, ensuring a smooth transition. With Azure Maps, Microsoft aims to simplify location-based services, empowering businesses to make better decisions using location data integrated with other Microsoft tools.
LastPass, a widely used password manager, is now encrypting URLs stored in its vaults. This means that the web addresses associated with your accounts will be scrambled for added security and privacy. Before this change, URLs were not encrypted due to technical limitations, but now, with advancements in technology, LastPass can encrypt them without affecting user experience. Encrypting URLs helps protect sensitive information about your accounts and enhances privacy. LastPass will roll out this encryption in two phases, starting in June, and users don't need to take any immediate action.
JFrog Forms Broad DevOps Alliance with GitHub
JFrog and GitHub have joined forces to integrate their DevOps platforms, aiming to streamline development workflows and enhance security. They will link GitHub's source code repositories with JFrog's built packages, enabling easier navigation and traceability. This collaboration also includes plans to improve security visibility and simplify the generation of software build materials. By integrating single sign-on capabilities, they aim to enhance security across DevOps workflows. This partnership is timely as AI capabilities are poised to revolutionize software development, making it more accessible and scalable. As AI becomes more prevalent, organizations may need to adapt their workflows to handle increasing code volumes efficiently.
Arista announces AI networking agent, Nvidia and Vast partnerships
Arista Networks is teaming up with Nvidia and Vast Data to enhance networking capabilities for AI clusters. They're developing a software agent to integrate network and server systems, using Nvidia's BlueField-3 SuperNIC for high-speed data transfer. This agent, based on Arista's EOS, manages switches, routers, and GPUs in one package. It helps configure, monitor, and debug network issues on servers, ensuring consistent performance and visibility across the AI data center. With the explosive growth of AI datasets, this technology addresses the challenge of coordinating components like GPUs, NICs, switches, and cables in large AI clusters. Arista will showcase this technology soon, with customer trials expected later in 2024. Additionally, Arista has partnered with Vast Data to provide high-performance infrastructure for AI development, integrating storage, database, and computing solutions.
HackHub: Best Tools for Cloud
sig allows interactive grep for streaming data, offers command re-execution, and features an archived mode for backward searching with options for installation and keymaps.
Beta9 is an open-source platform for scalable serverless GPU workloads, offering features like workload scaling, fast cold-start, automatic scaling to zero, distributed storage, multi-cloud support, and simple Python abstractions for deployment.
aspire/src/Aspire.Hosting.AWS at main · dotnet/aspire
The Aspire.Hosting.AWS library streamlines AWS SDK configuration and resource provisioning for .NET Aspire AppHost projects through simple extension methods and resource definitions, facilitating easy integration with AWS services.
awslabs/aws-sdk-python-signers
AWS SDK Python Signers provides standardized request signature generation, compatible with SigV4, for popular HTTP utilities like AIOHTTP, Curl, Postman, Requests, and urllib3. While in the Alpha development phase, it offers two primary signers, AsyncSigV4Signer and SigV4Signer, for seamless integration into your projects.
aws-samples/real-time-social-media-analytics-with-generative-ai
Uncover real-time social media insights with AWS Managed Apache Flink and Amazon Bedrock, enabling seamless integration of streaming data and GenAI capabilities. Deploying this architecture allows for user authentication via Amazon Cognito, data processing with Apache Flink, embedding tweets with Amazon Bedrock, and semantic search with AWS Lambda, facilitating dynamic interaction through Streamlit UI.
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