The newbie cloud architect diary

This article discusses different proxy types and introduces Envoy, a high performance distributed proxy designed for Microservices architectures. The daily mood In the past I intensively worked on our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) as a user. Although I was interested in it, I didn't have access to architecture details, developer repositories, operational processes and environments. Now that I have all this, it feels a bit stange that I am not yet able to bring them to life, in a way that I could immediately run and use our solutions as needed... Not that easy! Indeed, an application that basically looks like a monolith web server and database on the frontend side, actually appears to be a big and resource-intensive collection of  Microservices . Those need to be configured, secured and provisioned individually so that the application can be operated in Kubernetes.  This finding "positively" explains how we can scale accross a large number of tenants. It also "negati...

AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed  infrastructure for container orchestration. In our organisation it is secured by Okta/MFA. The daily mood I am motivated. My goal is to move simple assets from my local cluster (deployment source) to our remote/shared one (deployment target). For this I need to require access to a GitHub enterprise hosting our configuration repository, and an AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for running development workloads. Note: We also have cluster instances running on AWS virtual machines (EC2) and containers (ECS) which we manage using  Kubespray , as well as cluster instances in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). As far as I know, we do not use KOPS , another popular tool for installing and launching Kubernetes clusters in different cloud infrastructures. Access authorization GitHub Enterprise was pretty straight forward. I already had a personal account which just needed to be mapped with our organisation. Then ...

Kubernetes is a Container Orchestrator able to run in distributed mode. It has become the default platform for operating scalable applications. The daily mood My primary focus is to become familiar with, and improve our current Continuous Delivery & Deployment (CD) process, a software development and operation engineering discipline that requires high level of automation in order to improve the pace of innovation and quality of production. Our organisation already uses  Kubernetes  intensively. In terms of CD, we are slowly transiting from a traditional operational model to the  GitOps  philosophy. In my previous post  I have setup a local Kuberntes cluster and some tooling. Now we are going to talk about Kubernetes concepts and create an example application from scratch.  What is Kubernetes Kubernetes  (K8s) is a distributed system written in Go and used for container orchestration, i.e. for configuration, deployment and operation of contain...

Microk8s is a single-node Kubernetes cluster for the Ubuntu development workstation. Kubectl, Kubectx, Kubens  command line tools  belong to the basics. The daily mood I got assigned the task to analyze our release cycle in  Kubernetes . So first step is to read a bit, setup a single-node cluster on my local workstation (a developer laptop) and get familiar with it. There is a comprehensive guide for installing a Kubernetes cluster from scratch using kubeadm tool , but you can do so much wrong that it is easier and safer to rely on an existing distribution.  As an Ubuntu user I am picking  microk8s  that runs in a  snap  instead of  minikube  running in a  virtualbox . Because it is just so much lighter and faster. I read afterwards that  conjure-up  should be even better. Install MicroK8s $ sudo snap install microk8s --classic --channel=1.15/stable # comes with exact version 2.14.3 of Tiller $ microk8s.start $ microk8s.en...