Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Automation is a key component in the management of the entire software release lifecycle. While we know it is critical to the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery process, it is now becoming equally essential to the underlying infrastructure you depend on. As automation has increased, a new principle for managing infrastructure has emerged to prevent environment drift and ensure your infrastructure is consistently and reliably provisioned.

Many organizations use Kubernetes to quickly ship new features and improve the reliability of their services. Rancher enables teams to reduce the operational overhead of managing their cloud-native workloads — but getting continuous visibility into these environments can be challenging. In this post, we’ll explore how you can quickly start monitoring orchestrated workloads with Rancher’s built-in support for Prometheus and Grafana.

Having a proper backup recovery plan is vital to any organization's IT operation. However, when you begin to distribute workloads across data centers and regions, that process begins to become more and more complex. Container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes have begun to ease this burden and enabled the management of distributed workloads in areas that were previously very challenging.

As cloud providers and infrastructure technologies grow their support for Windows containers, developers who use the Windows ecosystem are more and more able to enjoy the benefits of containerization. It’s quicker and easier than ever to modernize and deploy applications that use Windows-specific frameworks like .NET. Plus, Windows developers can use orchestration services like Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, or Docker Swarm to manage the complexity that containerized environments introduce.

Canonical is proud to announce the general availability of OSM release EIGHT images in it’s Charmed OSM distribution. As of Release SEVEN, OSM is able to orchestrate containerised network functions (CNFs) leveraging Kubernetes as the underlying infrastructure for next-generation 5G services. Release EIGHT follows the same direction and brings new features that allow for the orchestration of a broader range of network functions and production environments.

Kubernetes has a lot of features and deployment options for running containers. One of these is the Service. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what Services are, what they can be used for, and how to create them.

The HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller integrates with cert-manager to provide Let’s Encrypt TLS certificates. When it comes to TLS in Kubernetes, the first thing to appreciate when you use the HAProxy Ingress Controller is that all traffic for all services travelling to your Kubernetes cluster passes through HAProxy. Requests are then routed towards the appropriate backend services depending on metadata in the request, such as the Host header.

Kubernetes (k8s) enables you to efficiently orchestrate container management, in the cloud or on-premises. As a whole, k8s provides many benefits, including features for self-healing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, load distribution, and scalability. However, k8s is a highly complex platform and requires extensive configuration.