Monitoring is a critical part of any computer system that has been brought in to a production-ready state. No IT system exists in true isolation, and even the simplest systems interact in interesting ways with the systems “surrounding” them. Since compute time, memory, and long-term storage are all finite, it’s necessary at the very least to understand how these things are being allocated.

Container monitoring strategies and purpose-built container monitoring tools just may be the next hot topics swirling around the Kubernetes discussion forums this year. Over 77% of IT professionals expected to migrate 50% or more of their workloads to containers with Kubernetes by the end of last year. With the rise of container usage growing, having the ability to monitor the performance of your containerized workloads is critical.

The lockc project provides mandatory access controls (MAC) for container workloads. Its goal is to improve the current state of container/host isolation. The lockc team believes that container engines and runtimes do not provide enough isolation from the host, which I describe later in the “Why do we need it?” Section. In this blog post, I’ll provide an introduction to lockc, discuss why you need it and show you how to try it out for yourself.

More than anything else, Kubernetes troubleshooting relies on the ability to quickly contextualize the problem with what’s happening in the rest of the cluster. As complicated as this may sound, SPEED is really the name of the game. After all, more often than not, you will be conducting your investigation under the glow of fires burning bright in production. Getting relevant context quickly and seeing things holistically is exactly what Komodor was created for.

Adopting a container-first approach represents an unrivalled opportunity for financial institutions to increase system efficiency and resource utilisation, improve security, introduce automation, and accelerate innovation. Containers offer a logical packaging tool in which applications can be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure on which they run.

It's 2022 and time to predict a few things for the coming year in the cloud native ecosystem.

Companies that want to take care of their customers have to invest in a Customer Success team and define the right strategy (Thanks Rav Dhaliwal for your help here). Thinking about customer success is typically something that happens much later (too late?) after the Sales efforts. Growth pressure on startups puts effort in the sales machine to close as many customers as possible while forgetting that growth comes from the current customers. A happy customer is less likely to churn.

The container orchestration service Kubernetes has taken cloud-native application hosting by storm. By automating infrastructure tasks, Kubernetes—an open-source system designed by Google—simplifies the technical work of application deployment, scaling, and management. Managed Kubernetes services take this process a step further, handling more of the management tasks so that engineers can focus more time and resources on developing apps.

Does this combination of words sound somewhat new to you as well? It may be just me, but having the opportunity to work on both sides, software development and system administration, the combination above seemed somewhat new or different to me. I always saw Oracle as something that would be managed and owned by the System Administrators. Technologies such as the database, ERPs, finance systems, and more which would take quite a lot of effort and cost to implement and maintain.

Whether you’re using a managed Kubernetes service like AWS EKS, GCP GKE or Azure AKS, or self-managing a DIY cluster deployed with open source tools like kops and Kubespray, the underlying hardware can vary from container to container. Each container requires specific resources (CPU/ memory/GPU/network/disk) and as long as the underlying infrastructure can provide those resources, the container will be able to execute its business logic.