Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Rancher

Introduction to K3s

Whether you’re new to the cloud native space or an accomplished practitioner, you’re probably aware that there are many Kubernetes distributions to choose from. Maybe you’ve heard about the challenges of getting up and running with Kubernetes. Guess what? It doesn’t have to be hard. This blog provides an introduction to K3s, a lightweight CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution. We’ll look at what makes K3s different from other Kubernetes distributions.

Introducing Kubewarden, an Open Source Policy Engine

Security has always been a wide and complex topic. A recent survey from StackRox about the state of containers and Kubernetes security provides some interesting data on these topics. In this blog post, I’ll dive into some of the findings in that survey and introduce you to Kubewarden, an open source policy engine. A staggering 66 percent of the survey participants do not feel confident enough in the security measures they have in place.

What Comes After Kubernetes?

You probably can’t believe I’m asking that question. It’s like showing up to a party and immediately asking about the afterparty. Is it really time to look for the exit? No…but yes. We used to deploy apps on systems in data centers. Then we moved the systems to the cloud. Then we moved the apps to containers. Then we wrapped it all in Kubernetes for orchestration, and here we are. Each advance in technology unlocks doors we couldn’t reach before.

April Online Meetup - Hypper: Dependency-aware package management for Kubernetes

Introducing Hypper, a new package manager for Kubernetes designed with cluster administrators in mind. Hypper is built on Helm and charts but makes some different assumptions around multi-tenancy and dependent charts (which can be useful with CRD handling). Where Helm assumes a user could be one of many users running in multi-tenant, Hypper assumes the user is a cluster administrator managing a cluster.

Kubernetes Master Class - How to Update Monitoring After Upgrading to Rancher 2.5

Rancher 2.5 introduces a new, improved monitoring integration. It is still based on Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager, but much more flexible regarding configuration options and customizations. It also directly ships with much improved dashboards and alerting rules. Unfortunately, due to the necessary internal changes, there is no automatic upgrade path available from the old to the new monitoring. While you can continue to use the old monitoring with 2.5, there are some manual migration steps necessary to get all the benefits from the new monitoring system and keep all the configurations and customizations from the old one.

Rancher Online Meetup - March 2021 - Rancher KIM

Introducing Rancher KIM, the Kubernetes Image Manager. KIM is a proper Kubernetes client that installs and manages the back-end services required to support its focus on delivering a `docker build` (and related image management) compatible experience to your development workflow. This means you can download the KIM executable for your client platform and run `kim build --tag your/image:tag .`, just as you would invoke `docker build`, and have the image immediately available on your single-node K3s cluster. There's no need to push the image to an external repository nor export it to a tarball and then import it into K3s containerd.

Kubernetes Master Class - Thanos and Istio

Rancher simplifies the deployment and management of monitoring (Prometheus) and observability (Istio) on a cluster to cluster basis. Each of these tools have extensions that allow for global view and global access. With the recent introduction of Fleet, Rancher 2.5 has reduced the barrier to entry for these configurations, making them available to organizations running at any scale.

Kubernetes Master Class: Declarative Security with Rancher, KubeLinter, and StackRox

As companies adopt containers and Kubernetes to accelerate application development, they’re wrestling with securing this new attack surface. Fortunately, the declarative, immutable nature of Kubernetes environments provides inherent security opportunities, and Kubernetes itself offers a broad set of native controls. However, these protections are not enabled by default, and many organizations are learning both the infrastructure aspects and the security aspects of Kubernetes in parallel.