The benefits of going cloud-native are far reaching: faster scaling, increased flexibility, and reduced infrastructure costs. According to Gartner®, “by 2027, more than 90% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 40% in 2021.” Yet, while the adoption of containers and Kubernetes is growing, it comes with increased operational complexity, especially around monitoring and visibility.

The latest surveys show that organizations are struggling to manage multi-cloud environments and overcome problems that include cloud cost, complexity, security, and visibility. In the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report, for example, enterprises cited managing cloud spend and managing multi-cloud environments as their top cloud challenges.

Kubernetes has become the de-facto platform for containerized applications. But it’s a fractured environment and each Kubernetes distribution has their own nuances. Further, much of today’s cloud native software design assumes a healthy Internet connection, which is not always available. What’s missing is a standardized way to deliver applications on top of any Kubernetes, without an Internet connection (also known as air-gapped deployments).

This Kubernetes Architecture series covers the main components used in Kubernetes and provides an introduction to Kubernetes architecture. After reading these blogs, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the main reasons for choosing Kubernetes as well as the main components that are involved when you start running applications on Kubernetes.

Rancher Desktop is equipped with convenient and powerful features that make it stand out as one of the best developer tools and the fastest ways to build and deploy Kubernetes locally. In this blog, we will tackle Rancher Desktop´s functionalities and features to guide you and help you take full advantage of all the benefits of using Rancher Desktop as a container management platform and for running local Kubernetes.

Bridging the gap between development and operations has become essential for the cultural shifts seen in organizations today. DevOps allows these concepts to be brought together, creating an influential blend of cultural philosophies, practices, and technological instruments, facilitating a quicker delivery of products and services. Throughout this blog, I will explore how we should all be embracing DevOps to allow our organizations to compete in an ever-changing digital world.

While Kubernetes comes with a number of benefits, it’s yet another piece of infrastructure that needs to be managed. Here, I’ll talk about three interesting ways that Honeycomb uses Honeycomb to get insight into our Kubernetes clusters. It’s worth calling out that we at Honeycomb use Amazon EKS to manage the control plane of our cluster, so this document will focus on monitoring Kubernetes as a consumer of a managed service.