Matt and I are out in Los Angeles this week for KubeCon 2021 this week. At the GitOpsCon event Tuesday we were excited to attend this Kubernetes session: GitOps in the Real World: Opportunities for Developer Experience Improvement.

Businesses around the world increasingly rely on the benefits of container technology to ease the burden of deploying and managing complex applications. Containers group all necessary dependencies within one package. They are portable, fast, secure, scalable, and easy to manage, making them the primary choice over traditional VMs. But to scale containers, you need a container orchestration tool—a framework for managing multiple containers.

In a previous post, we talked about the increasing adoption of Platform Engineering teams. The post covered topics such as defining Platform Engineering and the roles and responsibilities of the team. When building an internal platform, a clear goal that many teams want to achieve is: Even though this is key to a successful platform team, this responsibility increases complexity, costs, support time, and more. Not to mention that this can be a long, very long journey.

With the advent of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and IaC (Infrastructure as Code), it is now possible to manage versioning, code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines at the infrastructure level through resource provisioning and on-demand service routing. Kubernetes is the indisputable choice for container orchestration.

Congratulations to the Kubespray team on the release of 2.17! This release brings support for two of the newer features in Calico: support for the eBPF data plane, and also for WireGuard encryption. Let’s dive into configuring Kubespray to enable these new features.

Not to muddy the waters with one more prefix in front of ops, GitOps is a newer DevOps paradigm that slants towards the developer. As the names states, GitOps is focused around Git, the source code management tool. As a developer, leveraging an SCM is one of the quintessential tools of the trade; allowing for collaboration and more importantly saving your hard work off of your machine.