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Three easy ways to run Kafka without Zookeeper

There has been a couple of years since the announcement of the removal of Apache Zookeeper as a dependency to manage Apache Kafka metadata. Since version 2.8, we now can run a Kafka cluster without Zookeeper. This article will go over three easy ways to get started with a single node cluster using containers.

Control and data planes

Apache Kafka implements independent control and data planes for its clusters. The control plane manages the cluster, keeps track of what brokers are alive, and takes action when the set changes. Meanwhile, the data plane consists of the features required to handle producers and consumers and their records. In the previous iterations, Zookeeper was the cluster component that held most of the implementation of the control plane. 

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Beginners Guide to Installing Decision Management Tooling in a Local Container using Podman

Recently the open source community project called Podman announced that there was solid support for using its container tooling to replace docker on your local development machine. Ring in the joyous music and off we go to explore how we can get back to basics without the issues of licensing around the developer desktop container tooling.

Note, the rest of this tutorial will be based on the current version of Podman at the time of publication, v3.3.1.

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Beginners Guide to Installing Process Automation Tooling in a Local Container using Podman

Recently the open source community project called Podman announced that there was solid support for using its container tooling to replace docker on your local development machine. Ring in the joyous music and off we go to explore how we can get back to basics without the issues of licensing around the developer desktop container tooling.

Note, the rest of this tutorial will be based on the current version of Podman at the time of publication, v3.3.1.

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Replacing Docker Desktop With hyperkit + minikube

MacOS is a Unix but it isn't a Linux so, unfortunately, if/when we need to use Linux-y things like docker we need to install a VM just like in the Windows world. That's of course also true for docker. 

Like most people, I've been using Docker Desktop for a lot of years to get my fix for containers. It works pretty well, good even for almost everything. I don't remember exactly when Docker desktop added support for running Kubernetes. That looks good on paper and technically it works but not without a price... (at least on my Mac) it also comes with fans a-blazing and the soundtrack of a 747 taking off. Luckily, most of the time I have access to remote Kubernetes servers so I rarely used the option but whenever I did (re)try it, I quickly turned it back off. 

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Getting started with edge development on Linux using open source

There are many reasons why Linux is such a popular platform for processing Internet of Things (IoT) edge applications. A major one is a transparency. Linux security capabilities are built on open source projects, giving users a transparent view of security risks and threats and enables them to apply fixes quickly with security module patches or kernel-level updates. Another Linux advantage is that developers can choose from various programming languages to develop, test, and run device communications over various networking protocols—other than HTTP(s)—when developing IoT edge applications. It also enables developers to address server programming for controlling data flow from IoT devices to front-end graphical user interface (GUI) applications.

This article explains how to get started with IoT edge development using Quarkus, a cloud-native Java framework that enables you to integrate a lightweight message broker for processing data streams from IoT devices in a reactive way.

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My First GoLang Application in Kubernetes

Hi,

In an era of Kubernetes and container-based applications, it is very important to know Go Language as well. Go Lang is one of the popular (might be most popular) languages for developing Microservices or Enterprise Applications in Kubernetes or OpenShift. In this article, we will learn how to deploy the Go application in Kubernetes.

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Avengers of Container World, Episode 2: Buildah and Skopeo Hands-On

In the last episode (Episode 1: Podman Hands on), we got Podman working on CentOS/VirtualBox. We also pulled the tomcat image and got it running. In this episode, we will explore the advantages of Buildah and Skopeo and build a complete custom image with our sample web application.

Why Buildah?

Docker provided a very sophisticated configuration file-based provisioning with Dockerfile and Docker Compose. It provided a simple YAML-based configuration that the Docker daemon would use to build custom images as well as configure and provision the container. Docker daemon has the functionality to build, pull, push, run, and manage containers.

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Avengers of the Container World, Episode 1: Podman Hands-On

CRI-O and Podman have been widely adapted by most of the modern container platforms. In this blog, I will explore why everybody is gaga about this new ecosystem of tools/utilities and share some of my experience in this series.

I got a lot of feedback, after I published my blog on Containers and evolution of Containers (you can read it here 'Evolution of k8s worker nodes - CRI-O'). One of the common questions asked, is how Podman is different from Docker and how the new ecosystem of podman+buildah+cri-o+skopio different from what we do with docker... so I wanted to do a deep dive on these things, and share some of my experiences with this new ecosystem of container runtime and management tools/utilities.

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A Spotlight on Podman

Containerization is more than just the way forward. It is now the norm rather than the exception; all new apps are designed to leverage cloud-native features, with microservices running in containers. Containerization has enabled applications to run with immense efficiency and scalability, but the use of containers is not without its challenges.

Until very recently, the most prominent container engine was Docker. Even those running Kubernetes still rely on Docker containers as a way to orchestrate their applications. Today, however, Docker has a serious contender: Podman. Unlike Docker, which relies on daemons, Podman runs directly using runC runtime containers.

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Podman for Docker Users

Podman is the command-line interface tool that lets you interact with Libpod, a library for running and managing OCI-based containers. It is important to note that Podman doesn't depend on a daemon, and it doesn't require root privileges.

The first part of this tutorial focuses on similarities between Podman and Docker, and we'll show how you can do the following:

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Containers Without Docker

Why do people go for Docker? Though we have many container technologies, people preferred Docker for one reason: Docker made great leaps in the simplification of containers. It was always hard implementing containers in an organization before Docker.

Is Docker the only container technology? Can we create a container without Docker? This article talks about how we can create containers without Docker