Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Environments Based On Pull Requests (PRs): Using Argo CD To Apply GitOps Principles On Previews

Leave a reply

Release frequency keeps increasing and, with it, the need to get away from static environments like staging, integration, and other permanent setups. Dynamic environments based on pull requests are probably the best example of a need for a much higher level of dynamism. Kubernetes allows us to easily create whatever we need, and destroy what is not in use. There is no need for anything, especially not environments to be permanent, except for production. We can get far in that direction by combining GitOps practices and Argo CD in a way that each pull request (PR) creates a new environment that is destroyed when a PR is closed. By doing that, we can improve efficiency while, at the same time, reducing the costs.

Continue reading →

Kubevious: Kubernetes Dashboard That Isn’t A Waste Of Time

Leave a reply

After many failed attempts to find a Kubernetes dashboard that is actually useful (even a little bit), I finally stumbled upon Kubevious. There is finally a Kubernetes UI I can recommend.

Continue reading →

Serverless Computing With Knative And Containers As A Service (CaaS)

Leave a reply

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

All the commands from this article are in the [04-03-knative.sh](Gist with the commands: https://gist.github.com/dc4ba562328c1d088047884026371f1f) Gist.

Before we dive into the actual usage of Knative, let's see which components we got and how they interact with each other. We'll approach the subject by trying to figure out the flow of a request. It starts with a user.


Continue reading →

Google Cloud Run (GCR) vs Azure Container Instances (ACI) vs AWS ECS with Fargate

1 Reply

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Should we use managed Containers as a Service (CaaS)? That must be the most crucial question we should try to answer. Unfortunately, it is hard to provide a universal answer since the solutions differ significantly from one provider to another. Currently (July 2020), CaaS can be described as wild west with solutions ranging from amazing to useless.


Continue reading →

Using Docker To Deploy Applications To Azure Container Instances

Leave a reply

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Azure Container Instances are a way to deploy containers in the Cloud. Based on that, you might think that ACI is not much different from other Containers as a Service solutions. But it is. It does not have horizontal scaling, nor any other features often associated with schedulers like Kubernetes. It is limited to the ability to run a single container in isolation. It is very similar to using Docker, except that it is in Azure, and that it saves us from worrying about the infrastructure needed to run containers.

So, if Azure Container Instances are very similar to Docker, why not use docker instead of az CLI? Fortunately, folks at Docker asked themselves the same question and released Docker Desktop that supports ACI. It is available since version 2.3.3+.


Continue reading →

Discussing The “Real” Expectations For Serverless Computing

Leave a reply

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

What do I expect from serverless or, for that matter, any type of deployment services?


Continue reading →

What do I really think about managed Functions as a Service (FaaS)?

Leave a reply

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Personally, I do not think that managed Functions as a Service are a good idea. Functions are too small for my taste. The execution model in which each request is served by a fresh instance is deeply flawed. The pricing is too high for my budget.

All that being said, I can see use cases where managed FaaS is a perfect fit, but only if that would be the only flavor of serverless deployments. But it's not, even though many are putting the equation between FaaS and serverless computing.


Continue reading →

Should we use managed Functions as a Service (FaaS)?

Leave a reply

This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

We should ask two significant questions when contemplating whether we should use managed Functions as a Service (FaaS) flavor of serverless computing. Should we use them? If we should, shall it be AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, or something completely different?

So, should we use managed FaaS? We probably should. But that's not the right question. We can almost certainly find at least one good example. A more important question is whether managed FaaS can be the solution for a significant percentage of our workload. That's the question that is much more difficult to tackle. To answer it, we might need first to establish good use cases for deploying and running functions.


Continue reading →

Choosing The Right Deployment Strategy

Leave a reply

Deployment strategies affect everyone, no matter whether we are focused only on a single aspect of the application lifecycle or we are in full control. The way we deploy affects the architecture, testing, monitoring, and many other aspects. And not only that, but we can say that architecture, testing, and monitoring affect the way we deploy. All those things are closely related and affect each other.

We'll discuss different deployment strategies and answer a couple of questions. Is your application stateful or stateless? Does its architecture permit scaling? How do you roll back? How do you scale up and down? Do you need your application to run always? Should you use Kubernetes Deployments instead of, let's say, StatefulSets? Answers to those questions will not serve much unless we are familiar with some of the most commonly used deployment strategies. Not only that knowledge will help us choose which one to pick, but they might even influence the architecture of our applications.

DevOps Toolkit Books And Courses: https://www.devopstoolkitseries.com/
DevOps Paradox Podcast: https://www.devopsparadox.com/