Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform that significantly simplifies an application's creation and management. Distributed systems like Kubernetes can be hard to manage, as they involve many moving parts and all of them must work for the system to function. Even if a small part breaks, it needs to be detected, routed and fixed. These actions also need to be automated. Kubernetes allows us to do that with the help of readiness and liveness probes.

Containerisation has transformed the enterprise IT landscape, driving faster, more secure, and more predictable software delivery than ever before. Thanks to technologies like Docker, building containerised applications is easy, and many businesses are working with hundreds or even thousands of containers. To effectively deploy and manage all of these microservices, a container orchestration tool is essential, and Kubernetes is the leading solution.

Continuing on from Part One where we went through a brief history of containers and Kubernetes then Dockerized a NodeJS application, now we are ready to deploy to Kubernetes. If this is your first or nth time deploying to Kubernetes, Shipa makes this simple. You don’t have to worry about authoring multiple Kubernetes manifests and templates to deploy your application, all you need is an image.

This article was inspired by our recent "5 tools to increase Kubernetes developer productivity" video, hosted by Saiyam Pathak and Kunal Kushwaha. Over the years Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform, as such it's crucial that developers have the right set of tools to increase their productivity for development and operations. In this article, we take a look at five such tools that can help developers inprove productivity while when Kubernetes. Let’s jump in.

Creating a DevOps workflow to optimize application deployments to your Kubernetes cluster can be a complex journey. I recently demonstrated how to optimize your local K8s development workflow with Rancher Desktop and Skaffold. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it by viewing the video below. You might be wondering, “What happens next?” How do you extend this solution beyond a local setup to a real-world pipeline with a remote cluster?

KoolKits (Kubernetes toolkits) are highly-opinionated, language-specific, batteries-included debug container images for Kubernetes. In practice, they’re what you would’ve installed on your production pods if you were stuck during a tough debug session in an unfamiliar shell. To briefly give some background, note that these container images are intended for use with the new kubectl debug feature, which spins up Ephemeral containers for interactive troubleshooting.

Why this combination you ask? Load testing is my passion, and I am partial to Kubernetes. I challenged myself to share a use case that many could relate to, focused on a business critical application. Websites came to mind and WordPress is the world’s most popular website management system. Of course, nginx is the most popular web server so let’s throw that into the mix. And Kubernetes? With more than 50% of corporations adopting Kubernetes in 2021, what better system to run in.

Today, I was working on our Terraform Provider, and I noticed that I never tried to deploy an application from scratch on a new and clean AWS account. Meaning, an empty AWS account - with 0 resources created. No VPC, no EC2, no Load Balancer, nothing... just an IAM user to get access to my AWS account programmatically. This post explains what I did and how it took 37 minutes and 33 seconds to literally: 😅 Let's explain all of that!

Defining, building, and delivering a secure software supply chain is challenging for many organizations. Software builds utilize many open source components, and the vast landscape of cloud native developer and platform tools grows more extensive and more diverse every day. Developers, operators, and security teams must work together to ensure software is delivered swiftly and securely to meet business and customer desires.