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4 Big GitOps Moments of 2021

The growing complexity of application development and demand for more frequent deployments bolstered the rise of GitOps. GitOps, in simple terms, is all about using Git for container-based continuous integration and deployment. GitOps enables a seamless developer experience and greater control for Ops teams. It is often considered an extension of DevOps.

The central idea of GitOps is to use Git as the single source of truth. With Git repositories storing the declarative state of the system, it makes code management, reconciliation, and audits fairly easy to control and implement at scale. GitOps offers productivity, reliability, and security for cloud-native applications, accelerating its adoption.

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Kubernetes Fundamentals – Part 2

Kubernetes is everywhere now, but it’s primarily been the domain of people working on the Ops side of infrastructure. What about devs, though? You benefit from knowing what Kubernetes is and how to use it, too – otherwise, we’re still putting teams in silos. 

In this blog, we’re going to build off part one by learning about managed Kubernetes services: what they are, when they’re useful, and how you can try deploying to one yourself, starting with Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

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Managed Kubernetes Comparison: EKS vs GKE

Kubernetes is changing the tech space as it becomes increasingly prominent across various industries and environments. Kubernetes can now be found in on-premise data centers, cloud environments, edge solutions, and even space.

As a container orchestration system, Kubernetes automatically manages the availability and scalability of your containerized applications. Its architecture consists of various planes that make up what is known as a cluster. This cluster can be implemented (or deployed) in multiple ways, including adopting a CNCF-certified hosted or managed Kubernetes cluster. 

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Creating an AWS EKS Cluster and Providing Access to Developer

1. Introduction

This article is going to talk about mainly two points:

  1. How to create an AWS EKS Cluster.
  2. How to provide an AWS EKS cluster access to a developer who does not have admin access to AWS.

To deploy any microservices, we need to create AWS EKS clusters like dev and QA, etc. Once AWS EKS clusters are available then every developer should have access for logging and debugging purposes from their EC2 instance. 

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AWS EKS Implementation

AWS EKS

Kubernetes nowadays is a de-facto industry standard for container orchestration. More and more businesses are quickly adopting this approach. Developers have gladly accepted it but there is no denial that Kubernetes cluster management is quite demanding and requires a lot of time and effort.

To ease out the things, all the major cloud players have hosted and managed Kubernetes. In this article, we are going to discuss the AWS-managed EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services) and the steps to deploy it.

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EC2 Instance Types: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A DevOps life isn’t a piece of cake in AWS. How are you supposed to make sense of EC2 instance types when you’re looking at almost 400 different ones? Picking the right VM type for the job that doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket is a challenge. But there are a few things you can do to make your life easier (and gain points with your financial department).

Careful choice of EC2 instances is definitely worth your time because compute is the biggest part of your cloud bill. If you manage to optimize it, you’ll open the doors to dramatic reductions in your cloud costs. 

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How Are Zoom, Spotify, etc Slashing Their Cloud Costs by Millions?

In Q1 2021, Zoom reported that its gross margin widened to 73.9% from 69.4% in the previous quarter, primarily thanks to the optimization of public cloud resources. And Zoom is certainly not the only company that realized the value of optimizing the cloud infrastructure. As businesses migrate their workloads to the cloud and build cloud-native applications, they’re starting to realize that overprovisioning and cloud sprawl aren’t just urban legends. 

For startups, the cloud is an essential technology because of its unparalleled support for scalability. But the cloud may quickly turn into a struggle because of growing costs. Here's what a16z wrote in a recent analysis:

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5 Costly Kubernetes Traps and Their Solutions

Cost management gets complicated fast in Kubernetes, and more businesses will face this problem soon. According to Gartner, 75% of companies will be running containerized applications in production by 2022.

If you use Kubernetes on AWS, you’re probably implementing best practices to reduce your bill already. To maximize your cloud cost savings, though, you need to understand the specific challenges Kubernetes poses in cost management and optimization. Read this article to find out what they are and how to handle them.

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Deploying Containerized Apps on AWS? EKS vs. ECS For Workload Deployment

A Little Foreword

In order to bridge the gap of delivering products quickly, all organizations are shifting the base architectural design patterns to distributed system architecture. It's kind of common practice to either bootstrap or transition the existing applications to containerized or server-less architectures.

Managing clustered applications can soon become an overhead when the organization scale and hence increases a dire need for a platform that can support automation of all the tasks related to management, deployment, scaling of these clusters.

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How to Use AWS IAM Role on AWS EKS PODs

How It Works

It’s possible to attach an IAM role in a Kubernetes POD without using third-party software, such as kube2iam and kiam. This is thanks to the integration between AWS IAM and Kubernetes ServiceAccount, following the approach of IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA).

Attach IAM Role to the Kubernetes POD
Using an IAM Role in a Kubernetes POD

Benefits

There are quite a few benefits of using IRSA with Kubernetes PODs.

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Cost Optimization on AWS EKS Clusters

Containerization and modern cloud infrastructure have made it possible to deploy even the most complex applications without making big initial investments. With most cloud computing models, you pay fixed fees only for the resources you use, and you are all set. Scaling up (and down) becomes easier too since you are not actually investing in the physical hardware supporting the cloud cluster.

While the available services certainly make cloud computing more accessible, they still could cost a lot, especially when the cost of using cloud resources is not managed properly. It is easy to fall into the trap of buying into more resources that are not fully utilized and ending up paying more than you should.

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Upgrading Kubernetes Worker Nodes in GKE, AKS, and EKS

Kubernetes is a popular container orchestration platform that you can deploy on-premise or in the cloud. In this article, you will learn about Kubernetes upgrade options in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS).

What is a Kubernetes Cluster?

A cluster is a unit that includes several Kubernetes pods. A pod is a set of containers, with facilities to allow containers to communicate and share data between them. A cluster consists of the following components:

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Kops vs. EKS: A Comparison Guide

It is fairly safe to say that Kubernetes is now the go-to solution when it comes to deploying containerized apps. EKS simplifies the creation of a secure and capable K8s environment on the Amazon Web Services platform and makes deploying clusters there that much easier. We’ve covered EKS on several occasions previously here and here to read more. As discussed previously, EKS does have its limitations, but the service is very easy to use, even when you are not a server administrator.

However, EKS and similar services are not the only way you can set up a production-grade K8s environment. Kops, or Kubernetes Operations, has been around for a while, offering CLI tools that make creating and managing Kubernetes installations easy. Kops is designed for those who want complete control over their Kubernetes environment but without the usual headaches.

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Kubernetes on AWS: How to Connect to RDS

Hey there! It’s time to write a new blog post about something really hot — Kubernetes. In order to make this article even spicier, I want to talk about Kubernetes in terms of AWS and access to a database. So basically this post is for those of you who want to set up a Kubernetes application on Amazon Cloud and configure access to RDS (Postgres/MySQL) from the application. Let’s get started!

A long time ago, the software development world was taken by storm with the concept of containerization. Since that time, every backend developer should know what is Docker and how to use it. That was only the beginning of something bigger. Today, I can definitely say that containers without proper orchestration and service discovery mechanism are pretty useless. Here is where Kubernetes comes in.