Due to a great synergy between our products, I am happy to announce that Cloudflare and appfleet are joining forces! The appfleet platform is shutting down, with all clusters going offline on October 31st 2021.

Containers have revolutionized how we distribute applications by allowing replicated test environments, portability, resource efficiency, scalability and unmatched isolation capabilities. While containers help us package applications for easier deployment and updating, we need a set of specialized tools to manage them.

First of all what is appfleet? appfleet is an edge compute platform that allows people to deploy their web applications globally. Instead of running your code in a single centralized location you can now run it everywhere, at the same time. In simpler terms appfleet is a next-gen CDN, instead of being limited to only serving static content closer to your users you can now do the same thing for your whole codebase. Run the whole thing where just your cache used to be.

Today, most organizations, large or small, are hosting their SaaS application on the cloud using multi-tenant architecture. There are multiple reasons for this, but the most simple and straightforward reasons are cost and scalability. In a multi-tenant architecture, one instance of a software application is shared by multiple tenants (clients).

In this guide, we will use Ansible as a Deployment tool in a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment process using Jenkins Job. In the world of CI/CD process, Jenkins is a popular tool for provisioning development/production environments as well as application deployment through pipeline flow. Still, sometimes, it gets overwhelming to maintain the application's status, and script reusability becomes harder as the project grows.

There is no doubt about the fact that Docker makes it very easy to deploy multiple applications on a single box. Be it different versions of the same tool, different applications with different version dependencies - Docker has you covered. But then nothing comes free. This flexibility comes with some problems - like high disk usage and large images. With Docker, you have to be careful about writing your Dockerfile efficiently in order to reduce the image size and also improve the build times.

As the cloud-native ecosystem continues to evolve, many alternative solutions are popping-up, that challenges the status quo of application deployment methodologies. One of these solutions that is quickly gaining traction is Unikernels, which are executable images that can run natively on a hypervisor without the need for a separate operating system.

Having a proper backup recovery plan is vital to any organization's IT operation. However, when you begin to distribute workloads across data centers and regions, that process begins to become more and more complex. Container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes have begun to ease this burden and enabled the management of distributed workloads in areas that were previously very challenging.

Kubernetes is a powerful orchestration system, however, it can be really hard to configure its deployment process. Specific apps can help you manage multiple independent resources like pods, services, deployments, and replica sets. Yet, each must be described in the YAML manifest file.