Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kublr

Canary Releases on Kubernetes with Spinnaker, Istio, and Prometheus

In a microservices world, applications consist of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of components. Manually deploying and verifying deployment quality in production is virtually impossible. Kubernetes, which natively supports rolling updates, enables blue-green application deployments with Spinnaker. However, the gradual rollout is a feature that doesn’t come out-of-the-box but can be achieved by adding Istio and Prometheus to the equation.

Reliable, Self-Healing Kubernetes Explained

One of the great benefits of Kubernetes is its self-healing ability. If a containerized app or an application component goes down, Kubernetes will instantly redeploy it, matching the so-called desired state. But what if a Kubernetes component or a node goes down? Kubernetes doesn’t monitor itself nor does it have access to your infrastructure. And, guess what.

A Blueprint for Enterprise-grade Centralized Kubernetes Management

While developers see and realize the benefits of Kubernetes, how it improves efficiencies, saves time, and enables focus on the unique business requirements of each project; InfoSec, infrastructure, and software operations teams still face challenges when managing a new set of tools and technologies, and integrating them into existing enterprise infrastructure. 

Kubernetes Day Two: Transitioning from Development to Production

As your organization gets more comfortable with Kubernetes in development, you’ll want to prepare to adopt it in production. But mastering Kubernetes in dev does not necessarily translate into mastering it in prod. There are many additional components that must be configured and fine tuned to ensure reliable, self-healing production clusters. In this blog, we’ll walk through the key elements of a Kubernetes production setup.

Kublr 1.17 adds config page on UI, supports latest Kubernetes release (one of only a few providers)

If you’re an advanced Kubernetes user, you’ll likely want to configure parameters for specific use cases. While with Kublr, the most flexible Kubernetes platform on the market, literally everything is customizable (except, of course, if you want to replace Kubernetes with a different container orchestrator), a lot of the customization in the previous versions was still done via command line.

Kubernetes + Kublr Architecture

Kubernetes, the de facto container orchestrator, is great and should be part of any DevOps toolkit. But, just as any other open source technology, it’s not a full-fletched ready-to-use platform. To run in prod, you’ll need multiple addtional components such as logging and monitoring or RBAC integration. Check out our interactive Kubernetes architecture presetation to learn about key Kubernetes components and those added by Kublr.

Kublr 1.16 supports rolling upgrades with zero downtime across clouds and on-prem

When evaluating Kubernetes providers, you’ll quickly see that they ALL support upgrades. But here’s a little dirty secret, no independent Kubernetes multi-cloud, multi-cluster platform supports rolling updates. Instead, you’ll need to deploy a different cluster and replicate your app to ensure service delivery while the original cluster is updated. That process is cumbersome and requires far too many resources.

How Self-Healing Nodes and Infrastructure Management Impact Reliability

Self-healing does not equal self-healing. There are multiple layers to it, whether a self-healing infrastructure, cluster, pods, or Kubernetes. Kubernetes itself ensures self-healing pods. But how do you ensure your applications, whose reliability depends on every single layer, are truly reliable?