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The latest News and Information on Containers, Kubernetes, Docker and related technologies.

Containers Orchestration, Monitoring & Logging

In this webinar, we will be exploring container orchestration, reviewing some tools commonly used to monitor containerized environments, and providing some best practices for logging containers and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes using the ELK stack and Logz.io. We’ll also dive into some real-life examples.

Peering Inside the Container: How to Work with Docker Logs

We live in a containerized world, and traditional monitoring and logging are being forever changed. The dynamic and ephemeral nature of containers creates new logging challenges. Docker addresses these in some ways. Docker Engine provides various logging drivers that determine where logs are sent or written to. The default driver for Docker logs is “json-file,” which writes the logs to local files on the Docker host in json format.

What to do when you lose logs with Kubernetes

Kubernetes has fundamentally changed the way we manage our production environments. The ability to quickly bring up infrastructure on demand is a beautiful thing, but along with it brings some complexity, especially when it comes to logging. Logging is always an important part of maintaining a solid running infrastructure, but even more so with Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes clusters are constantly being spun up, spun down, always in flux, making sure logging functions correctly is critical.

Intro to k3s Lightweight Kubernetes Online training

Earlier this year, Rancher Labs introduced k3s, a new open source project which is a lightweight implementation of Kubernetes that is easy to install and can run on x86 and ARM infrastructure with only 512 MB of RAM required to run it. It is geared towards teams that need to deploy applications quickly and reliably to resource-constrained environments. Some use cases for k3s are edge, Single Board Computers, IoT, and CI.

Dynamic Kubernetes Informers

In the past I’ve written about how to use informers in Kubernetes for particular resources, but what if you need to be able to receive events for any Kubernetes resource dynamically? Well, there’s a client-go package for that too. At FireHydrant, we recently updated our Kubernetes integration to watch changes for any resource you configure and I wanted to write down how we made it at a high level.

Authentication and Authorization for multiple Kubernetes clusters with Rancher

A Kubernetes cluster is a collection of resources running across multiple nodes. Managing these resources also entails granting and controlling users' access to them. Different teams could be running their applications on the same cluster. Configuring RBAC is essential when it comes to such multi-tenant setups. Grouping resources into namespaces and giving certain teams access to them is a good start. Rancher leverages this to more effectively group the cluster's resources into larger subsets called projects.

Falco in the open

One of the most successful aspects of Kubernetes is how functional the open source community was able to operate. Kubernetes broke itself down in smaller sections called special interest groups, that operate similarly to subsections of the kernel. Each group is responsible for a single domain, and sets their own pace. One of the most important things to a Kubernetes SIG, is the residual SIG calls.

And Then There Were Three -- IBM, VMWare, and Rancher

When we started Rancher in 2014, our vision was to enable enterprise IT to procure and utilize computing resources (“cattle”) from any infrastructure provider. We were extremely lucky to be able to leverage wonderful technologies like Kubernetes which made computing resources consistent across all infrastructure providers.

Zero to k3s Kubeconfig in seconds with k3sup

k3sup: From zero to KUBECONFIG in < 1 min K3s is an open-source, lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Rancher that was introduced this year and has gained huge popularity. People not only like the concept behind it, but also the awesome work that the team has done to strip down the heavy Kubernetes distribution to a minimal level. Though k3s started as a POC project for local Kubernetes development, its development has led people to use it even at a production level.