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Why We Decided to Build a K8ssandra Operator – Part 4

In the first, second, and third posts in this series, we’ve shared conversations with K8ssandra core team members on our journey to build a Kubernetes operator for K8ssandra. We’ve discussed the virtues of the Helm package manager versus Kubernetes operators for deploying and managing infrastructure in Kubernetes and some of our implementation choices for the operator.

In this final post of the series, we pick up from the previous post with a discussion of how we decided to structure our projects in GitHub, how we test the K8ssandra operator, and our hopes for how the operator will expand the K8ssandra developer community.

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Cloud Computing Trends for 2022

Cloud computing kept the business and remote workforces connected during the coronavirus pandemic. As we move into 2022 and beyond, every organization would eventually adopt cloud models and existing cloud businesses would look at ways to streamline their processes for rapid growth and better business continuity.

Here are my personal views on top cloud computing trends that organizations need to watch out for.

Mitigating Risks Using Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Strategy

Cloud forms the backbone of many critical applications and with many significant outages from major cloud providers last year, it would be essential for enterprises to embark on a multi-cloud strategy for mitigating risks around a single point of failure.

Critical applications and governance functions can employ a cloud strategy that includes a hybrid and with a multi-cloud strategy. In this model, applications run on on-premises as well as Cloud powered by multiple cloud providers, ensuring data sovereignty, disaster recovery, and risk mitigation along with being agile and scalable.

A critical factor would be to design and build cloud-native applications that can run and scale on any cloud environment and a management platform that helps manage the hybrid and multi-cloud environments. I will touch upon the management platform further when I describe the unified cloud platform.

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The Intelligent Storage Revolution

Intelligent computing and intelligent storage are the future. Intelligent computing is the ability to automatically adjust computing resources based on data and application needs, such as the acceleration of an analytics workload. 

Intelligent storage ensures that applications can always access their data by transparently managing multiple disk tiers. 

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Redshift vs. Snowflake: The Definitive Guide

What Is Snowflake?

At its core Snowflake is a data platform. It's not specifically based on any cloud service which means it can run any of the major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution, it helps organizations consolidate data from different sources into a central repository for analytics purposes to help solve Business Intelligence use cases.

Once data is loaded into Snowflake, data scientists, engineers, and analysts can use business logic to transform and model that data in a way that makes sense for their company. With Snowflake users can easily query data using simple SQL. This information is then used to power reports and dashboards so business stakeholders can make key decisions based on relevant insights.

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AWS Activate — A Program That Can Save You More Than $110.000,00

Introduction

AWS Activate is a program that helps start-ups and scale-ups to build their companies. There are two Program Tiers that a start-up can join. The AWS Activate Founders is a basic tier and it gives you $1.000,00 credits to use the AWS services + $350,00 for the AWS Developer Support plan. The other program tier is the AWS Activate Portfolio, this is an extensive tier that gives you $100.000,00 credits to use AWS services and $10.000,00 for the AWS Business Support plan.

At the time of this publication, the discount will cover all the costs for 165 AWS services and AWS Developer/Business Support. There are also the Exclusive Offers that include discounts for third-party software, such as Jira, Bitbucket, Slack, JFrog Artifactory, and others.

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5 Simple Tips to Keep Dockerized Apps Secure

Ever since virtualization support went mainstream, developers have started to embrace containerization as a means of enhancing app security. And when used well, it's an excellent approach. Unfortunately, countless things can destroy the security benefits of containerization when overlooked.

But, short of taking some additional coursework on the subject, there aren't many places you can go to learn about the best practices of containerization. And since Docker is the most popular containerization option in the world right now, that seems like a natural place to start. Here are five simple containerization security tips to help you keep your Dockerized apps secure.

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Enter the Cloud Native Dojo: Blackbelt-Level Debugging

Debugging is often viewed as an art form or a craft. This is true for most engineering-related troubleshooting processes (e.g., the art of motorcycle maintenance). We’re usually indoctrinated into the basic moves by a senior developer and are then thrown into the proverbial pool. As a result, even senior engineers sometimes have gaps in their debugging skills. There are very few university courses or books on the subject, so it’s really hard to blame them.

In his book, “Why Programs Fail — A Guide to Systemic Debugging”, Andreas Zeller told a story from his youth working at a computer store. A customer walked into the store with a new Commodore 64 computer. For context: The computers back then booted directly to a basic interpreter; basic would accept line numbers as the first argument. He tried inputting this valid basic line:

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5 CDK Lessons Learned

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) allows you to define your AWS resources using the programming languages you know and love. This concept piqued the interest of many of us here at Instil; when someone offers us the ability to use Typescript instead of YAML we’re sold!

I have been using CDK for the past 3 years for container-based and serverless projects, and what I think is CDK’s greatest strength are the guard rails it provides to the developer:

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Cloud-Native Compilation: Bringing JVMs Into the Modern Cloud World

Across the industry, companies are trying to rein in runaway cloud costs by squeezing more carrying capacity out of the instances they run in the cloud. Especially in the Java space, developers are trying to fit workloads into smaller and smaller instances and utilize server resources with maximum efficiency. Relying on elastic horizontal scaling to deal with spikes in traffic means that Java workloads must start fast and stay fast. But some antiquated features of the JVM make it hard to effectively utilize the resources on your cloud instances.

It’s time to re-imagine how Java runs in a cloud-centric world. We started by exploring how compilation can be optimized by offloading JIT workloads to cloud resources. Can we achieve optimized code that is both more performant and takes less time to warm up?

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Cloud Systems (Part 2): Containerizing a Website

Cloud engineering is taking over software development. In a lot of ways, this is great; it allows us to build and deploy more complicated applications with less difficulty, and maintaining those applications becomes less troublesome too. We can release smaller updates more quickly than ever, ensuring that we can stay on top of feature requests and security issues. That said, the rise of cloud engineering has also introduced a lot of complexity in the form of dozens of services even within just one cloud provider. Figuring out where to start can be tough, so let’s take a practical tour! In this series, I’ll walk you through building a personal website and deploying it using modern cloud engineering practices.

In part one of this series, we built a personal website and deployed it to AWS S3. That works perfectly well for a static, single-page application with minimal interactivity, but if you want server-side routing or database interactivity, things have to get a little bit more complicated. In part two of this series, we’ll be adding a couple more pages to our personal website, adding server-side routing, and containerizing it with Docker.

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7 Alternatives to Using Segment

What Is a CDP (Customer Data Platform)?

CDPs have risen up as one of the best solutions to tackle the challenge of data accessibility. Strictly speaking, CDPs collect and consolidate data from various sources and send that information to different target destinations (i.e. marketing tools and sales tools). The purpose of a CDP is to aggregate the information from various data sources and combine it together to create a single 360-degree view of the customer. 

In addition to this, they also provide an additional activation layer to enable marketing automation. This is because CDPs were created to analyze user behavior and personalize their experiences. Every company has data, so CDPs are useful for both B2C companies and B2B companies.

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Backing Up K8ssandra With MinIO

K8ssandra includes Medusa for Apache Cassandra® to handle backup and restore for your Cassandra nodes. Recently Medusa was upgraded to introduce support for all S3 compatible backends, including MinIO, the popular k8s-native object storage suite. Let’s see how to set up K8ssandra and MinIO to backup Cassandra in just a few steps.

Deploy MinIO

Similar to K8ssandra, MinIO can be simply deployed through Helm.

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Cloud Migration Checklist

In several cases where IT executives work towards moving key enterprise applications to the public cloud, their teams struggle or have limited success in their cloud migrations. However, they never give up and they use these lessons to improve their results in subsequent attempts.

If your organization is wanting to modernize mission-critical applications and you’re designing a cloud migration as a locality of this process, you don’t wish to repeat others’ mistakes.

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Testing Serverless Functions

Serverless computing, or functions-as-a-service, has picked up a lot of attention and speed due to its cost-effective pay-as-you-go price offering, multi-language/runtime support, as well as its easy learning curve without any need to provide the infrastructure layer. All the major cloud providers now have a serverless computing offer as part of their services portfolio: Amazon Web Services has Lambda, Microsoft Azure has Azure Functions, and Google Cloud has Cloud Functions. Furthermore, there are on-prem/on-Kubernetes options for running serverless functions on OpenWhisk or OpenFaaS. For the sake of consistency, I will refer to all of these services as serverless functions throughout the rest of this post. 

In a microservices (or even nanoservices, as serverless functions are sometimes known) architecture, there are inherently lots of components, modules, and services that form part of an application or platform. This can make testing a chore, and sometimes a neglected part of the SDLC for these platforms. This article will explore some options and techniques for testing these types of platforms to help make this aspect of your projects easier. Testing should always be a first-class citizen, regardless of the infrastructure. Irrespective of the language, framework, or tools we use, testing is vital to ensure both sustained development velocity and the quality of our deliveries to production. 

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New Open-Source Multi-Cloud Asset to build SaaS

Over the last months I’ve worked with many companies who want to build SaaS (Software as a Service) to scale their solutions to new markets and to save costs. To address these needs, our team has produced an asset that demonstrates how to build cloud-native applications that can be deployed to multiple clouds and how they can be exposed in multiple marketplaces. Red Hat OpenShift is a perfect technology to address these requirements.

Check out the SaaS repo.

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AWS DynamoDB Table Design in 10 Minutes

AWS DynamoDB is a serverless key and value pair NOSQL database. The schema design concept is different from traditional relational database. You can understand the DynamoDB table design within 10 minutes in this video.

Thank you for watching!

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How To Ensure Your Kubernetes Cloud OS Security

The main feature of the Kubernetes cloud OS is that any module in the cluster can interact seamlessly with another module. Although the user gets unlimited access to useful platforms and new features at the same time, such a model is fraught with potential risks and vulnerabilities. 

In this regard, there are two radically different approaches to security: shift to the right and shift to the left, static and dynamic approach.