Author: Sylvain Kalache

Kubernetes can be intricate to manage, and companies want to leverage its power while avoiding its complexity. A recent survey found that 84% of companies don’t see value in owning Kubernetes themselves. To address this complexity, Cloud Foundry introduced open-source Korifi, which preserves the classic Cloud Foundry experience of being able to deploy apps written in any language or framework with a single cf push command. But the big difference is that this time, apps are pushed to Kubernetes.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to use Korifi to deploy web applications written in different languages: Ruby, Node.js, ASP.NET, and PHP. I will also provide insights into Korifi’s functioning and basic configuration knowledge, helping you kick-start your multi-cloud, multitenant, and polyglot journey.

Open-source Cloud Foundry Korifi is designed to provide developers with an efficient approach to delivering and managing cloud-native applications on Kubernetes with automated networking, security, availability, and more. With Korifi, the simplicity of the cf push command is now available on Kubernetes.

In this tutorial, I will walk you through the installation of Korifi on kind using a locally deployed container registry. The installation process happens in two steps:

With the advent of microservices in Kubernetes, individual developer teams now manage their own data, middleware, and databases. Automated tests and CI/CD pipelines must be revisited to include these new requirements.

This session demonstrates how to use Kustomize and Tekton to provide Kube-Native automated workflows taking into account new parameters such as database operators, StorageClass, and PVC.

Accidental Kubernetes PVC delete or namespace delete can cause the Persistent Volume to get deleted. Such volumes lose their data, and the stateful applications lose their state. By using Persistent Volume TrashCan, users can get a grace period to undo such unintended delete operations.

This talk will showcase how to overcome one of the admin’s pain points involving accidental deletions of PVCs by using advanced storage management solutions in Kubernetes.

In this Talk, Anynines CEO Julian Fisher shares about the challenges of managing a Kubernetes operator's lifecycle. Julian and his team benchmarked multiple tools that could help with that. The talk covers Carvel, Helm, OLM, and Operator SDK, where the pros and cons are shared for each tool.

Julian Fischer  00:00

Running a Postgres installation is trivial. However, setting up a production environment is a whole different matter. The main reason is that Postgres is not by itself a production-ready software, it requires a set of side tools to complement its functionality such as connection pooling, monitoring, backup tools, high availability management...

In this talk, Álvaro Hernández, founder and CEO at OnGres, discusses how Kubernetes is the best platform to make Postgres production-ready as well as other extra advantages it provides.

The automation of data services on Kubernetes is increasing in popularity. And running stateful workloads on K8s means using operators. But engineers are often surprised by the complexity of writing a Kubernetes operator, which impacts end-users. The Data on Kubernetes 2021 Report found that the quality of Kubernetes operators was blocking companies from further expanding their data on Kubernetes footprint. 

Anynines CEO Julian Fischer – who has built automation tools for nearly a decade – knows a lot about dealing with the complexity of doing stateful on cloud-native platforms and distributed infrastructure such as Kubernetes.

Kubernetes users are confused about when one should make a Deployment with a PVC and when they should use a StatefulSet with a PVC. There is also a general lack of understanding regarding disk access policies, what RWO/RWX means, and what they allow you to do. These concepts are complicated and require a deep level of understanding to avoid users making bad decisions that they come to regret later.

In the talk, Portainer co-founder Neil Cresswell explores when one should use each type and what should be considered before deciding: from disk access policy, understanding what RWO really is and how RWX disk access changes the equation for persistence.

Kubernetes cannot natively manage stateful applications like databases, especially when it comes to day-2 operations. It needs a specific network configuration, persistent storage, and dedicated computing capacity. All of this is done by Kubernetes operators.

In this talk, Percona Product Manager Sergey Pronin explains why operators are needed to run MongoDB on Kubernetes and how to migrate MongoDB to Kubernetes with a demo using Percona's MongoDB operator.

Cassandra is a highly scalable database with an architecture that makes it well suited for multi-region workloads. As companies are standardizing on Kubernetes, they often want their clusters to span across multiple zones within a single region. However, multi-region Kubernetes clusters have serious technical challenges to overcome to be used in production. The challenge of handling stateful workloads on a multi-cluster Kubernetes setup, and more specifically with Kubernetes operators, was heavily discussed at KubeCon EU 2022.

In this presentation, DataStax Software Engineer John Sanda introduces K8ssandra Operator, which has been designed specifically to address the issue of running Cassandra on a Kubernetes multi-cluster deployment. John discusses how it was designed, how to reconcile objects across multiple clusters, how to manage secrets, pitfalls to avoid, and testing strategies. All of this knowledge can be ported to build other multi-cluster-friendly Kubernetes operators.

Running data on Kubernetes is becoming an industry standard, but DreamWorks was among the few very early adopters – starting in 2017 – that started the trend. DreamWorks currently runs 370 databases on over Kubernetes 1,200 pods making it one of the largest stateful infrastructures running on top of Kubernetes.

Interviewed by DoKC Head of Content Sylvain Kalache, DreamWorks’ Data Service Lead Ara Zarifian discusses how the company manages stateful workloads on Kubernetes, key benefits, and challenges. Ara shares the innovative standards they developed for Kubernetes operators, a key element of running stateful workloads on Kubernetes. This innovation allowed them to grow the number of databases hosted on Kubernetes without needing to increase their DBAs headcount exponentially.

Kubernetes used to be a platform that could only host stateless workloads, and while this has mostly changed with up to 90% believing Kubernetes is ready for stateful workloads, "databases like PostgreSQL cannot run on Kubernetes" is something that you can still hear. However, Gabriele Bartolini,  Vice President of Cloud Native for EDB, and Francesco Canovai, System Engineer for 2ndQuadrant, think otherwise. 

But they don’t want us to take their words for granted. If a company is considering running Postgres on Kubernetes, the first question they should ask is “why”. Once the goal is figured out, benchmarking the setup is a great way to ensure that it will be performed as needed. 

There are a lot of different approaches working for a spot in an attempt to solve ETL/ELT on Kubernetes. Considering that the cloud-native landscape is built for deploying Dockerized, open-source software, many of the closed-source solutions don’t align with the trajectory of the community.

In this DoKC session, Airbyte's senior developer advocate, Abhi Vaidyanatha, discusses how they implemented strategies as his team launched their K8s beta from the nuances behind deploying an ETL/ELT pipeline. Abhi further solidifies their development insights in accordance with the final implementation of their architecture.