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What Is Argo CD? The GitOps Tool for Kubernetes

Argo CD is a continuous delivery (CD) tool that has gained popularity in DevOps for performing application delivery onto Kubernetes. It relies on a deployment method known as GitOps. GitOps is a mechanism that can pull the latest code and application configuration from the last known Git commit version and deploy it directly into Kubernetes resources. The wide adoption and popularity are because Argo CD helps developers manage infrastructure and applications lifecycle in one platform.

To understand Argo CD in-depth, we must first understand how continuous delivery works for most application teams and how it differs from GitOps.         

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What Is Platform Engineering? How To Get Started

Platform engineering is the discipline of building and maintaining a self-service platform for developers. The platform provides a set of cloud-native tools and services to help developers deliver applications quickly and efficiently. The goal of platform engineering is to improve developer experience (DX) by standardizing and automating most of the tasks in the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). Instead of context switching like provisioning infrastructure, managing security, and learning curve, developers can focus on coding and delivering the business logic using automated platforms.

Platform engineering has an inward-looking perspective as it focuses on optimizing developers in the organization for better productivity. Organizations benefit greatly from developers working at the optimum level because it leads to faster release cycles. The platform makes it happen by providing everything developers need to get their code into production so they do not have to wait for other IT teams for infrastructure and tooling. The self-service platform that makes developers' day-to-day activities more effortless and autonomous is called an internal developer platform (IDP).

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What Is Kubernetes Dashboard and Its Alternatives

What Is Kubernetes Dashboard

Kubernetes provides a command line (CLI) component called “kubectl” for carrying core operations. But there are two significant hurdles to using CLI enterprise-wide

  • The high learning curve for developers to adopt Kubernetes for deployment.
  • Time-consuming and frustrating work for SREs and Ops team to monitor and troubleshoot multiple clusters at scale

Dashboard by Kubernetes ( also known as Kubernetes Dashboard) is a web-based user interface to deploy applications into the Kubernetes cluster, monitor the health of all the resources and troubleshoot them in case of any issues. The application is helpful for DevOps, Ops, and SRE teams to manage Kubernetes resources such as Deployments, Statefulsets, Jobs, etc. One can quickly deploy an application using manifest files and update the help from the UI itself.

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Introduction to Kubernetes Event-Driven Auto-Scaling (KEDA)

Manual scaling is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Currently, autoscaling is the norm, and organizations that deploy into Kubernetes clusters get built-in autoscaling features like HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaling) and VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaling). But these solutions have limitations. For example, it's difficult for HPA to scale back the number of pods to zero or (de)scale pods based on metrics other than memory or CPU usage. As a result, KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling) was introduced to address some of these challenges in autoscaling K8s workloads.

In this blog, we will delve into KEDA and discuss the following points:
What is KEDA?
KEDA architecture and components
KEDA installation and demo
Integrate KEDA in CI/CD pipelines

What Is KEDA?

KEDA is a lightweight, open-source Kubernetes event-driven autoscaler that DevOps, SRE, and Ops teams use to scale pods horizontally based on external events or triggers. KEDA helps to extend the capability of native Kubernetes autoscaling solutions, which rely on standard resource metrics such as CPU or memory. You can deploy KEDA into a Kubernetes cluster and manage the scaling of pods using custom resource definitions (CRDs).

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What Is a Kubernetes CI/CD Pipeline?

Since organizations began migrating from building monolith applications to microservices, containerization technology has been on the rise. With applications running on hundreds and thousands of containerized environments, an effective tool to manage and orchestrate those containers became essential.

Kubernetes (K8s)—an open-source container orchestration tool from Google—became popular with features that improved the deployment process for companies. With its high flexibility and scalability features, Kubernetes has emerged as the leading container orchestration tool, and over 60% of companies have already adopted Kubernetes in 2022.

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What Is Zero Trust Security and Why Is It Necessary?

What is Zero Trust?

Zero Trust is a security model that enables the DevSecOps team to deal with vulnerabilities that have arisen with massive digital transformations like cloud adoption, decentralized infrastructure, and container technologies. Though these have enabled teams to deliver products and services efficiently, the traditional security models pose a massive threat. The idea of trusting anyone inside the organization’s network is a massive flaw that needed rethinking.

The core of the Zero Trust security model is to trust no one and always verify. This approach establishes a hard rule to always validate every digital interaction. Zero Trust framework assumes an organization’s network security is always at risk to external and internal threats. It helps organize and strategize a thorough approach to counter those threats.

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Comparison Between Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps

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What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

Site Reliability Engineering happens when an organization looks at problems through the lens of a software problem. SRE is a software engineering approach where Site Reliability engineers use the software as a tool to manage systems, solve issues, and automate repetitive/mundane tasks. 

The primary aim of implementing this engineering practice is to develop a reliable and scalable software delivery system. The concept of this engineering practice was originally used by Google and creator Ben Treynor Sloss.

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Canary Deployment, Constraints, and Benefits

Understanding Canary 

Canary was an essential part of British mining history: these humble birds were used to detect carbon monoxide and other toxic gases before the gases could hurt humans (the canary is more sensitive to airborne toxins than humans). The term “canary analysis” in software deployment serves a similar purpose. Just as the canary notified miners about any problems in the air they breathed, DevOps engineers use a canary deployment analysis to gauge if their new release in CI/CD process will cause any trouble to business.

You can consider the following general definition of a canary release deployment: canary deployment is a technique to reduce the risk of introducing a software update in production by slowly rolling out the change to a small subset of users before making it available to everybody. 

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What Is a CI/CD Pipeline?

A series of steps that include all the stages from the outset of the CI/CD process and is responsible for creating automated and seamless software delivery is called a CI/CD pipeline workflow. With a CI/CD pipeline, a software release artifact can move and progress through the pipeline right from the code check-in stage through the test, build, deploy, and production stages. This concept is powerful because once a pipeline has been specified, parts or all of it can be automated, speeding the process and reducing errors. In other words, a CI/CD pipeline makes it easier for enterprises to deliver software multiple times a day automatically.

DevOps engineers often get confused with the CI/CD pipeline by automation of individual stages in CI/CD. Though different tools may automate each complicated stage in CI/CD, the whole software supply chain of CI/CD may still be broken because of manual intervention in between. But let us first understand various stages in a CI/CD process and why a CI/CD pipeline is essential for your organization to deliver code at speed and scale.