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MicroProfile Config With etcd

In this short video, Rudy de Busscher demonstrates how to use MicroProfile Config with etcd. 

Eclipse MicroProfile has been created as a open source specification for Enterprise Java microservices. It's aim is to work on microservices patterns for Enterprise Java and to integrate applications with the infrastructures they run on, with patterns like health checks, metrics, etc. The MicroProfile project was launched in June 2016 as a collaborative effort between Java application server vendors and the enterprise Java community to enable fast innovation.

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Atomic Replication Changes in etcd/Raft

At Cockroach Labs, we write quite a bit about consensus algorithms. They are a critical component of CockroachDB and we rely on them in the lower layers of our transactional, scalable, distributed key-value store. In fact, large clusters can contain tens of thousands of consensus groups because in CockroachDB, every Range (similar to a shard) is an independent consensus group. Under the hood, we run a large number of instances of Raft (a consensus algorithm), which has come with interesting engineering challenges. This post dives into one that we’ve tackled recently: adding support for atomic replication changes (“Joint Quorums”) to etcd/raft and using them in CockroachDB to improve resilience against region failures.

A replication change is a configuration change of a Range, that is, a change in where the consistent copies of that Range should be stored. Let’s use a standard deployment topology to illustrate this.

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The Gorilla Guide to Kubernetes in the Enterprise — Chapter 2: Kubernetes Concepts and Architecture

This is an excerpt from The Gorilla Guide to Kubernetes in the Enterprise, written by Joep Piscaer. See Chapter 1: The Changing Development Landscape. You can download the full guide here.

Kubernetes: More than Just Container Orchestration

As stated before (but is worth stating again), Kubernetes is an open source platform for deploying and managing containers. It provides a container runtime, container orchestration, container-centric infrastructure orchestration, self-healing mechanisms, service discovery and load balancing. It's used for the deployment, scaling, management, and composition of application containers across clusters of hosts.

But Kubernetes is more than just a container orchestrator. It could be thought of as the operating system for cloud-native applications in the sense that it's the platform that applications run on, just as desktop applications run on MacOS, Windows, or Linux.

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Klusterkit: An Open Source Toolkit to Simplify Kubernetes Deployments

Today, we're excited to announce that Platform9 is open-sourcing Klusterkit, a set of three open source tools available under the Apache v2.0 license on GitHub.

Our customers deploy their software on their private data centers that are often air-gapped environments (either for security reasons, or other considerations). These large organizations were looking to take advantage of Kubernetes and modernize their applications, while enabling deployment of these on different data centers that are often not connected to the outside world.

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Kubernetes Node Administration and Dependencies Deployment: From Zero to Hero With nodeadm

Over the past two years, deploying a conformant Kubernetes cluster has become even easier, thanks to the efforts of the Cluster Lifecycle Special Interest Group (SIG) and its kubeadm tool. But if you've used kubeadm on a freshly provisioned machine, you know there is a considerable set of tasks you have to complete prior to running kubeadm:

  1. Install your choice of container runtime
  2. Configure container runtime storage
  3. Install the Container Network Interface (CNI) binaries
  4. Install kubelet dependencies
  5. Configure control groups driver for kubelet
  6. Configure kernel parameters
  7. Call kubeadm (the hero)

To take you from zero to hero (see what I did there?), the team at Platform9 has built nodeadm, an unassuming but jovial sidekick to kubeadm. Like kubeadm, it's open-source and focused on making it easy to manage the Kubernetes lifecycle. You can use it in concert with tools like etcdadm and cctl as part of our Klusterkit, together with your own automation software, or interactively.