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The Most Popular Kubernetes Alternatives and Competitors

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration tool developed by Google and is also known as K8s. It is used in managing the complete lifecycle of containerized applications. Kubernetes provides high availability, scalability, and predictability to the containerized application. It automates the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. Kubernetes also supports automated rollout and rollbacks,  service discovery, storage orchestration, scaling, batch execution, and more. Kubernetes provides the cluster where containerized applications can be deployed. Kubernetes is not the only container orchestration tool, but various “Kubernetes Alternatives” are available in the market.

Before we talk about the “Alternatives to Kubernetes,” let’s explore the key components of Kubernetes. The Kubernetes cluster consists of at least one worker node where containerized applications are deployed and one master node or control plane which manages the worker nodes. The Control plane or master node consists of Kube-API server, etcd, Kube-scheduler, and Kube-controller-manager, whereas the worker node consists of Kubelet, Kube-Proxy, and Container Runtime. 

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What Is BizTalk Server?

If you wanted to explain BizTalk Server to a technology guy, the answer would be:

BizTalk Server is a middleware product from Microsoft that helps connect various systems together.

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MSA as a Project

Have you ever heard of such a strange thing as “MSA as a Project”?

You look at the title and ask, "What nonsense is this?"

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Agility Office: The Backbone of Any Transformation

Introduction

In the traditional world of Project and Program Management, Project Management Office (PMO) played a very crucial way in standardizing and unifying the various Project Management processes and activities. With the software industry transforming its working into an Agile Way of Working, one gets a sense that the PMO has become anachronistic and is more or less become extinct.  However, that's not the case and we have many organizations creating Agility Office / Agile Program Office / Agile Transformation Office / Agile Orchestration Office to name a few.

In this article, we will use the word Agility Office to represent the above nomenclatures. While many might think it's just a christening from PMO to the above names, the reality is that Agility Office is the Key driver of Agility across organizations Transformation journey.

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10 Mistakes to Avoid When Sizing Your Cloud Resources

One of the most common concerns when moving to the cloud is cost. Given that cloud allows you to turn IT costs from CAPEX (long-term investments ex. in hardware equipment and software licenses) into OPEX (day-to-day operating expenses), it’s crucial to choose the right service and estimate it properly. In this article, we’ll look at the common pitfalls and discuss how you can avoid them to truly benefit from the cloud’s elasticity.

#1 Following the Lift and Shift Approach

The lift and shift approach means that you are moving an exact copy of your workload to the cloud with as few changes as possible. Even though this pattern may be useful if you want to move to the cloud quickly, it may lead to suboptimal usage of your resources. AWS acknowledged that this is a difficult problem by creating services to make this migration easier (CloudEndure Migration and AWS Server Migration Service). Still, for the best possible resource utilization, it’s best to consider rearchitecting your solution for the cloud.

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Distributed Saga and Resiliency of Microservices

Sagas are typically used for modeling long-lived transactions like those involved in workflows. It is not advisable to use two-phase transaction protocols to control long-lived transactions since the locking of resources for prolonged durations across trust boundaries is not practical, rather is not at all advisable. Sagas are similar to nested transactions. In a nested transaction, atomic transactions are embedded in other transactions. In sagas, each of these transactions has a corresponding compensating transaction. While a Saga proceeds with its steps, if any of the transactions in a saga fails, the compensating actions for each transaction that was successfully run previously will be invoked so as to nullify the effect of the previously successful transactions.

Modeling a Saga and setting up a Saga Infrastructure is rather straight forward in Local and simple deployments, however when we want to scale out in public cloud environments, and that too with multiple instances of the same type of microservice, there comes a new list of challenges. We will look at few of them in this discussion.

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Cloud and an Architectural Perspective Between Risk and Services

Currently, software architecture has several challenges, such as long-awaited scalability. The cloud brought this possibility with several IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services. With so many options and services, which one to choose for each scenario? This article aims to talk a little about the disadvantages of choosing cloud services in our corporate software.

There are many challenges for an architect, like scalability and reduction of the response time of a request. It is nothing new that the concept of the cloud has brought several benefits to the world of software. In general, the cloud brought some of the following advantages:

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Containers: Orchestration and Beyond

From the introduction of Docker to LXC to Kubernetes, the world of containers has been constantly evolving — and it is not going to slow down any time soon. As the adoption of containers and their counterparts increases drastically, engineers and enterprises have had to increasingly put work into ensuring not only container security but also general functionality and maintenance. Download this guide to learn major orchestration trends, Kubernetes security, and more!
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Updated Analytics and Big Data Comparison: AWS Vs. Azure

Building upon my earlier post, today, I wanted to share with you updated graphics and links for the analytic and big data services offered by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

It is my hope that this post will be a starting guide for you when you need to research these analytics and big data services. I have included relevant links for each service, along with some commentary, in the text of this post below. I’ve done my best to align the services, but there is some overlap between offerings. 

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10 Basic Facts About Kubernetes That You Didn’t Know

Kubernetes is a growing trend. In recent years, K8s technology has experienced a rapid rise from a small open source Google project to the main project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Nowadays, many organizations and companies are using it to automate the management of containerized applications. But there are a lot of questions around Kubernetes, and in this article, I will try to answer the most popular ones.

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Docker Swarm, Kubernetes’s Clever Little Brother

Is Kubernetes Suitable for Any Container-Based Project?


There is no doubt that Kubernetes is one of the most talked about technologies in the domain of cloud and containers. Kubernetes provides a complete solution to managing containers, but there are cases where it is not the best solution.

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The Many Flavors of API Coordination

With the increasingly collaborative scenarios in which APIs are used, as well as the growing maturity and scale of microservice architectures, the idea of API coordination has become a hot topic.

Sam Newman and Phil Calçado have popularized the “Back-end for Frontend (BFF)” deployment pattern, which describes a topological approach to coordinating service API calls. However, coordinating API calls in a distributed software system is not a new problem. It has been a concern even from the early days of SOA. In my experience, software architects can often conflate the different types of coordination when trying to determine function placement in their application integration efforts. To help address this pitfall, here is a classification system I use:

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Orchestrating and Deploying Containers

To understand the current and future state of containers, we gathered insights from 33 IT executives who are actively using containers. We asked, "What are the most important elements to orchestrating and deploying containers?"

Here's what they told us: