Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It was a cloudy winter morning when I had arrived at the office and found, to our horror, that a Kubernetes cluster was suffering from extremely high CPU and network usage and had become almost completely non-functional. To make things worse, restarting the nodes (the go-to DevOp solution), seemed to have absolutely no effect on the issue. Something was poisoning the network and we had to find out what it was and fast.

Prometheus is an open-source system for monitoring and alerting originally developed by Soundcloud. It moved to Cloud Native Computing Federation (CNCF) in 2016 and became one of the most popular projects after Kubernetes. It can monitor everything from an entire Linux server to a stand-alone web server, a database service or a single process. In Prometheus terminology, the things it monitors are called Targets. Each unit of a target is called a metric.

This is a guest post from Kamesh Pemmaraju of Platform9. As organizations move to a containerized world, whether by producing containerized software, consuming it or both, the need for a managed Kubernetes offering and an Enterprise-tested private Docker registry is apparent. With the introduction of Platform9‘s new Freedom Plan for managed Kubernetes, you can combine it with JFrog Container Registry and power up your containerization transformation for free.

At re:Invent in December, Amazon announced the AWS Graviton2 processor and its forthcoming availability powering Amazon EC2 M6g instances. While the first-generation Graviton processor that powered A1 instances was better suited to less compute-intensive workloads, this processor is intended to offer AWS customers a compelling alternative to conventional x86-powered instances on both performance and cost.

Scylla is an open source database alternative to Apache Cassandra, built to deliver significantly higher throughput, single-digit millisecond latency, and always-on availability for real-time applications. Unlike Cassandra which is written in Java, Scylla is implemented in C++ to provide greater control over low-level operations and eliminate latency issues related to garbage collection.

Identity and access management (IAM) in AWS is a way to grant access to AWS services and collect and transmit data and credentials. Most Kubernetes “Quick Start” guides for AWS do not adequately cover how to manage IAM access in your pods. This blog series will first go over the security issues specific to AWS IAM on Kubernetes, then compare solutions, and then we will end with a detailed walkthrough for setting up your cluster with one of those solutions.

In Part 1 of this series, we demonstrated how to enable PSPs in Rancher, using restricted PSP policy as default. We also showed how this prevented a privileged pod from being admitted to the cluster. Enforcement capabilities of a Pod Security Policy We intentionally omitted particular details about role-based access control (RBAC) and how to link pods with specific PSPs. Let’s move on and dig in more on PSPs.