Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Improving And Simplifying Software Development With Jenkins X

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Software development is hard. It takes years to become a proficient developer, and the tech and the processes change every so often. What was effective yesterday, is not necessarily effective today. The number of languages we code in is increasing. While in the past, most developers would work in the same language throughout their whole carrier, today it is not uncommon for a developer to work on multiple projects written in different languages. We might, for example, work on a new project and code in Go, while we still need to maintain some other project written in Java. For us to be efficient, we need to install compilers, helper libraries, and quite a few other things.

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Is Your Cluster Ready For Jenkins X?

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If you're reading this, the chances are that you do not want to use jx cluster create to create a new cluster that will host Jenkins X. That is OK, or even welcome. That likely means that you are already experienced with Kubernetes and that you already have applications running in Kubernetes. That's a sign of maturity and your desire to add Jenkins X to the mix of whichever applications you are already running there. After all, it would be silly to create a new cluster for each set of applications.

However, using an existing Kubernetes cluster is risky. Many people think that they are so smart that they will assemble their Kubernetes cluster from scratch. "We're so awesome that we don't need tools like Rancher to create a cluster for us." "We'll do it with kubeadm." Then, after a lot of sweat, we announce that the cluster is operational, only to discover that there is no StorageClass or that networking does not work. So, if you assembled your own cluster and you want to use Jenkins X inside it, you need to ask yourself whether that cluster is set up correctly. Does it have everything we need? Does it comply with standards, or did you tweak it to meet your corporate restrictions? Did you choose to remove StorageClass because all your applications are stateless? Were you forced by your security department to restrict communication between Namespaces? Is the Kubernetes version too old? We can answer those and many other questions by running compliance tests.
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What Is Jenkins X?

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To understand intricacies and inner workings of Jenkins X, we need to understand Kubernetes. But, you do not need to understand Kubernetes to use Jenkins X. That is one of the main contributions of the project. Jenkins X allows us to harness the power of Kubernetes without spending eternity learning the ever-growing list of the things it does. Jenkins X helps us by simplifying complex processes into concepts that can be adopted quickly and without spending months in trying to figure out "the right way to do stuff." It helps by removing and simplifying some of the problems caused by the overall complexity of Kubernetes and its ecosystem. If you are indeed a Kubernetes ninja, you will appreciate all the effort put into Jenkins X. If you're not, you will be able to jump right in and harness the power of Kubernetes without ripping your hair out of frustration caused by Kubernetes complexity.

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“The DevOps 2.5 Toolkit: Monitoring, Logging, and Auto-Scaling Kubernetes” is available!

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The DevOps 2.5 Toolkit: Monitoring, Logging, and Auto-Scaling Kubernetes is finally finished!!!

What do we do in Kubernetes after we master deployments and automate all the processes? We dive into monitoring, logging, auto-scaling, and other topics aimed at making our cluster resilient, self-sufficient, and self-adaptive.
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What Should We Expect From Centralized Logging?

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There are quite a few candidates for your need for centralized logging. Which one should you choose? Will it be Papertrail, Elasticsearch-Fluentd-Kibana stack (EFK), AWS CloudWatch, GCP Stackdriver, Azure Log Analytics, or something else?

When possible and practical, I prefer a centralized logging solution provided as a service, instead of running it inside my clusters. Many things are easier when others are making sure that everything works. If we use Helm to install EFK, it might seem like an easy setup. However, maintenance is far from trivial. Elasticsearch requires a lot of resources. For smaller clusters, compute required to run Elasticsearch alone is likely higher than the price of Papertrail or similar solutions. If I can get a service managed by others for the same price as running the alternative inside my own cluster, service wins most of the time. But, there are a few exceptions.
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A Quick Introduction To Prometheus And Alertmanager

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Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) and Cluster Autoscaler (CA) provide essential, yet very rudimentary mechanisms to scale our Pods and clusters. While they do scaling decently well, they do not solve our need to be alerted when there's something wrong, nor do they provide enough information required to find the cause of an issue. We'll need to expand our setup with additional tools that will allow us to store and query metrics as well as to receive notifications when there is an issue.

If we focus on tools that we can install and manage ourselves, there is very little doubt about what to use. If we look at the list of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects, only two graduated so far (October 2018). Those are Kubernetes and Prometheus. Given that we are looking for a tool that will allow us to store and query metrics and that Prometheus fulfills that need, the choice is straightforward. That is not to say that there are no other similar tools worth considering. There are, but they are all service based. We might explore them later but, for now, we're focused on those that we can run inside our cluster. So, we'll add Prometheus to the mix and try to answer a simple question. What is Prometheus?
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Kubernetes’ Cluster Autoscaler Compared in GKE, EKS, and AKS

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Kubernetes' Cluster Autoscaler is a prime example of the differences between different managed Kubernetes offerings. We'll use it to compare the three major Kubernetes-as-a-Service providers.

I'll limit the comparison between the vendors only to the topics related to Cluster Autoscaling.
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Setting Up Cluster Autoscaler In EKS

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Unlike GKE, EKS does not come with Cluster Autoscaler. We'll have to configure it ourselves. We'll need to add a few tags to the Autoscaling Group dedicated to worker nodes, to put additional permissions to the Role we're using, and to install Cluster Autoscaler.
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To Replicas Or Not To Replicas In Kubernetes Deployments And StatefulSets?

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Knowing that HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) manages auto-scaling of our applications, the question might arise regarding replicas. Should we define them in our Deployments and StatefulSets, or should we rely solely on HPA to manage them? Instead of answering that question directly, we'll explore different combinations and, based on results, define the strategy.

First, let's see how many Pods we have in our cluster right now.

You might not be able to use the same commands since they assume that go-demo-5 application is already running, that the cluster has HPA enabled, that you cloned the code, and a few other things. I presented the outputs so that you can follow the logic without running the same commands.

The output is as follows.

We can see that there are two replicas of the api Deployment, and three replicas of the db StatefulSets.
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Four Phases Of Kubernetes Adoption

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Kubernetes is probably the biggest project we know. It is vast, and yet many think that after a few weeks or months of reading and practice they know all there is to know about it. It's much bigger than that, and it is growing faster than most of us can follow. How far did you get in Kubernetes adoption?

From my experience, there are four main phases in Kubernetes adoption.

In the first phase, we create a cluster and learn intricacies of Kube API and different types of resources (e.g., Pods, Ingress, Deployments, StatefulSets, and so on). Once we are comfortable with the way Kubernetes works, we start deploying and managing our applications. By the end of this phase, we can shout "look at me, I have things running in my production Kubernetes cluster, and nothing blew up!" I explained most of this phase in The DevOps 2.3 Toolkit: Kubernetes.
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