In a previous post, we explained the concept of configuration management and presented three of the most popular tools: Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. We also briefly explored the impact that containerization is having on configuration management, and how the two can be used in combination. This article takes a more in-depth look at this relationship by presenting different techniques for using Chef, Puppet, and Ansible to deploy and manage a Kubernetes cluster.

When you are using Rancher to manage your Kubernetes clusters, at some point you will encounter the terms Rancher, RKE, and custom cluster. If you are new to Rancher, it can be difficult to understand the difference between and purpose of each of these concepts. In this post, I will go over what each component is used for and how they are used together in parts of the system.

We are excited about Calico v3.5 release. This release provides more control and allows much finer-grained dynamic IP management vs the static allocation of a fixed set of addresses to each node in native Kubernetes. Here are the details.

Etcd is an open-source distributed key-value store created by the CoreOS team, now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is pronounced “et-cee-dee”, making reference to distributing the Unix “/etc” directory, where most global configuration files live, across multiple machines. It serves as the backbone of many distributed systems, providing a reliable way for storing data across a cluster of servers.

One of the key Kubernetes security concepts is that workload identity is tied back to information that the orchestrator has. The orchestrator is actually the authoritative entity for what the actual workloads are in the platform. Kubernetes uses labels to select objects and to identify collections of objects that satisfy certain conditions. We, and others in the Kubernetes networking space, often talk about using Kubernetes ‘labels’ as identity bearers.

OpsRamp, the service-centric AIOps software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for the hybrid enterprise, today announced new topology maps, enhanced artificial intelligence for IT operatzions (AIOps) features and new monitoring capabilities for cloud native workloads.