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How are you deploying your applications in 2019? Are you using containers yet? According to recent research over 80% of you are. If you are within this group, were you initially sold on the idea of containers but found that in reality, the complexity involved with this approach makes it a difficult trade-off to justify? The community is aware of this and has come up with a remedy to ease the pain, and it’s called container orchestration.

In an ideal scenario, security would be baked into the development process from the very beginning. Security teams would primarily exist to verify that best practices have been followed at every step in the process. In practice, security is an enormous challenge for most organizations. This challenge is compounded by the increasingly complex and fast-paced nature of modern service-oriented architectures, such as Kubernetes.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that can also provide service discovery for microservice-based applications. It’s the default DNS server in Kubernetes, providing name resolution and service discovery for the services operating in the cluster. CoreDNS is easily customizable, so you can define how it should act on each request beyond simply executing a DNS lookup.

Containers, along with containerization technology like Docker and Kubernetes, have become increasingly common components in many developers’ toolkits. The goal of containerization, at its core, is to offer a better way to create, package, and deploy software across different environments in a predictable and easy-to-manage way.

One of the many challenges when building an application is ensuring that it's secure. Whether you're storing hashed passwords, sanitizing user inputs, or even just constantly updating package dependencies to the latest and greatest, the effort to attain a secure application is never-ending. And even though containerization has made it easier to ship better software faster, there are still plenty of considerations to take when securing your infrastructure as well.

We’ve all been in the situation where suddenly you are the lone developer on call while everyone is out of pocket. Or in the case of Grafana Labs Director of UX David Kaltschmidt, his then business partner, Grafana Labs VP of Product Tom Wilkie, was checking out for a weekend music fest. “Tom and I founded a company a couple of years ago, and I’m more of a frontend person. Tom did all the backend and devops stuff,” explained Kaltschimdt.

Congratulations Twistlock! One of the best signs of an emerging market is when existing, massive players are willing to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to get into that market right now. Given today’s Twistlock acquisition by Palo Alto Networks, and other recent acquisitions like Heptio/VMware, we believe this is happening in the cloud-native market. Congratulations to Twistlock on their success.

The mechanism for interacting with Kubernetes on a daily basis is typically through a command line tool called kubectl. kubectl is primarily used to communicate with Kubernetes API servers to create, update, delete workloads within Kubernetes. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an overview of some of the common commands that you can utilise, as well as provide a good starting point in managing Kubernetes.