Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With over 58K stars on GitHub and over 2,200 contributors across the globe, Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration. While solving some of the key challenges involved in running distributed microservices, it has also introduced some new ones. Not surprisingly, when asked, engineers list monitoring as one of the main obstacles for adopting Kubernetes. After all, monitoring distributed environments has never been easy and Kubernetes adds additional complexity.

Now that we understand what machine data is available to us, how do we get to this data? The good news is that Kubernetes makes most of this data readily available, you just need the right tool to gather and view it. The solution we will discuss here heavily utilizes open source tools for collection and data enrichment because of their deep integrations and overwhelming community support.

ELK and Kubernetes are used in the same sentence usually in the context of describing a monitoring stack. ELK integrates natively with Kubernetes and is a popular open-source solution for collecting, storing and analyzing Kubernetes telemetry data. However, ELK and Kubernetes are increasingly being used in another context — that of a method for deploying and managing the former.

Over my last two posts (part 1 and part 2), I have investigated user authentication in Kubernetes and how to create a single sign-on experience within the Kubernetes ecosystem. So far I have explained how Open ID Connect (OIDC) works, how to get started with OIDC and how to perform a login from the command line. The final piece of this puzzle is the Kubernetes dashboard, often used by our engineers alongside kubectl.

Researchers at Netflix and Google recently reported a vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol that enables adversaries to execute a DOS attack by legitimate use of the protocol. These types of attacks are very difficult to detect and mitigate because the traffic is valid HTTP/2 traffic. While HTTP/2 is a relatively new protocol it should be noted that even after several years of hardening we still see vulnerabilities for the TCP protocol like the recently reported SACK vulnerability.

Once you’ve hired a software engineer, it’s easy to feel like the recruiting process is over. However, the first few days and weeks of your new engineer’s experience are critical to their long term success and happiness at your startup. In this last part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about how we onboard software engineers at Blue Matador and the insights I’ve gained in this part of the CTO experience.

Edge computing has become a clear strategic goal for many enterprises, for some it is already an absolute necessity. As the demands of applications software and the capabilities of hardware continue to grow, containers and Kubernetes have become a compelling technology for edge computing. In just the past 5 years, the way that software is manufactured and maintained has changed dramatically with the introduction of Kubernetes container orchestration.

Kubernetes is THE buzzword these days. Almost every IT organization is currently using it or is in the process of implementing it as part of their infrastructure. The transition to Kubernetes is complicated, whether a company is using an on-premises, cloud, hybrid, or managed solution, and it usually involves other changes in the codebase, such as shifting to a microservices architecture. While the implementation phase is led by the DevOps team, it requires the participation of the whole R&D group.