Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Containers are no longer a thing of the future – they are all around us. Companies use them to run everything – from the simplest scripts to large applications. You create a container and run the same thing locally, in the test environment, in QA, and finally in production. A stateless box built with minimal requirements and unlike virtual machines – without the need of virtualizing the whole operating system.

A month and a half ago we released ValidKube, our first OS project that fused the capabilities of three other popular OS tools (kubeval, kubectl-neat and trivy) in a single easy-to-use microsite. Using the microsite, any user could ensure the security and hygiene of their K8s YAML, with just a few clicks of the button, pretty much on the fly. ValidKube was born out of a straightforward concept and we were happy to see its user-friendly approach resonate almost immediately.

March 29th, 2022—Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announces that Firmus, the Australian cloud infrastructure provider that is revolutionising data centre technology, has built its ultra-efficient and sustainable public cloud on Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack and Charmed Kubernetes.

Running Kubernetes in production at scale can be a huge challenge for today’s organizations. And few companies have the right platform, experience, and skills to get there themselves. This was the case with Girls Who Code, an international nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in technology, who had to quickly change course and develop things that weren’t on their radar months ago because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kubernetes is a rich ecosystem, and the native YAML or JSON manifest files remain a popular way to deploy applications. YAML’s support for multi-document files makes it often possible to describe complex applications with a single file. The Kubernetes CLI also allows for many individual YAML or JSON files to be applied at once by referencing their parent directory, reducing most Kubernetes deployments to a single kubectl call.

Deployment is an essential stage of any software development project. With the fast-paced modern agile software development needs, deployment frequency increases rapidly. Although it looks very appealing to often release due to its positive impact on customer satisfaction and improved customer engagement, it is risky at the same time. What if the deployment goes wrong on production?

Kubernetes is becoming a dominant platform for running workloads. As the Kubernetes ecosystem continues to advance capturing a wider swath of workloads, eventually your code might be headed to Kubernetes. As a Tech Lead at Shipa responsible for front-end engineering e.g what you see on the screen, my job crosses JavaScript Frameworks and Kubernetes on a daily basis.