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The latest News and Information on Containers, Kubernetes, Docker and related technologies.

First Impressions of 'Managed K3s'

The k3s project was started by Darren Shepherd, Chief Architect at Rancher 7 months ago and has already become one of the most popular Kubernetes options on the CNCF Landscape by number of GitHub stars. To put this into context, k3s is more popular than OpenShift by IBM/Red Hat and only Rancher Kubernetes itself is more popular than k3s. Now stars are indicative of interest and popularity only and that should be noted.

Enable GitOps for Kubernetes Security - Part 1

“How do I enable GitOps for my network policies?” That is a common question we hear from security teams. Getting started with Kubernetes is relatively simple, but moving production workloads to Kubernetes requires alignment from all stakeholders – developers, platform engineering, network engineering, security. Most security teams already have a high-level security blueprint for their data centers.

Monitoring Amazon ECS with Blue Matador

Amazon ECS allows you to easily run containers in AWS in units called tasks. Groups of identical tasks are called services, and groups of services running on the same infrastructure are called clusters. Since it is critical to the health of your application, properly monitoring ECS is a top priority for most teams. In this blog post, we will go over how Blue Matador monitors ECS tasks automatically and without configuration.

Kubernetes Master Class: Kubernetes from Zero to Hero

Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for deploying containerized applications at scale on the different cloud providers. Why is this? In this Kubernetes Master Class, we'll discuss the reasons for using Kubernetes (K8s), the core concepts, architecture, real-life scenarios, and the differences betwen using managed vs un-managed K8s solutions, and how to reduce costs by using cloud excess capacity.

Automating Container Infrastructure Management with Spotinst & Rancher

Over the last few years, we have seen a significant shift with companies moving away from developing heavy, monolithic applications and instead adopting new approaches like microservices and even serverless applications. These allow companies to work in a faster and more agile way. Speed and agility are important when a task like deploying a new piece of code to production multiple times a day is normal behavior for a modern environment.

Crafting the perfect Java Docker build flow

What is the bare minimum you need to build, test and run your Java application in Docker container? The recipe: Create a separate Docker image for each step and optimize the way you are running it. I started working with Java in 1998, and for a long time, it was my main programming language. It was a long love–hate relationship. During my work career, I wrote a lot of code in Java. Despite that fact, I don’t think Java is usually the right choice for microservices.

Up and Running: Windows Containers With Rancher 2.3 and Terraform

Windows Support went GA for Kubernetes in version 1.14 and represented years of work. This has been the effort of excellent engineers from companies including Microsoft, Pivotal, VMWare, RedHat, and the now-defunct Apprenda, among others. I’ve been a lurker and occasional contributor to the sig-windows community going back to my days with Apprenda, and I’ve continued to follow it in my current role with Rancher Labs.

Helm 3: Navigating to Distant Shores

Since its initial debut 5 years ago Kubernetes has grown up quite a bit, but one thing hasn’t changed: writing Kubernetes manifest files from scratch is hard. In fact, it’s borderline discouraging for new users looking to use the defacto container orchestrator. Thus, the need for a package manager was born: Helm. Helm is almost as old as Kubernetes (it’s about 4 years) old and Helm 2 is a merger of two code bases, which made for some interesting ways of approaching even the most basic of security concerns (say, RBAC for instance). If you’re familiar with Helm you already know how useful it is, but there are features you’d like added, some updates you’ve wished for, and a major component you’d like removed: Tiller.

October Online Meetup: Hands on with Rancher 2 3 -- The Enterprise Cluster Command Center

Kubernetes enables a common compute platform across any infrastructure and a consistent set of infrastructure capabilities including improved reliability, enhanced security and increased operational efficiencies. But as organizations adopt Kubernetes, clusters are often deployed with limited access to shared tooling and services, inconsistent security policies and no centralized cluster operations.