Docker is a high-level virtualization platform that lets you package software as isolated units called containers. Containers are created from images that include everything needed to run the packaged workload, such as executable binaries and dependency libraries. Images are defined in Dockerfiles. These resemble sequential scripts that are executed to assemble an image.

When running a cloud service, it’s never good for customers to be the first people noticing an issue. It happened to our customers over the course of a few months, and we began to accumulate a series of reports of unpredictable start-up times for Docker jobs. At first the reports were rare, but the frequency began to increase. Jobs with high parallelism were disproportionately represented in the reports.

Observability has gained a lot of momentum and is now rightly a central component of the microservices landscape: It’s an important part of the cloud native world where you may have many microservices deployed on a production Kubernetes cluster, and a need to monitor these microservices keeps rising. In production, quickly finding failures and fixing them is crucial. As the name suggests, observability plays an important role in this failure discovery.

Flux is a CNCF based open source stack of tools. Flux focuses on making it possible to keep Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native applications in sync with external resources and definitions hosted in environments such as GitHub. Implementing tools like FluxCD should enable you to achieve results such as: The results above can bring obvious benefits, and many teams are adopting FluxCD as their tool of choice for GitOps.

The Docker images we provide for both Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 already contain quite a number of modules. For example, the Icinga Web 2 image contains all the Web modules developed by us. But one of the main benefits of Icinga is extensibility, so you might want to use more than what is already included. This might be some third-party module or a custom in-house module.

VMware Tanzu Community Edition is a freely available, community-supported, open source distribution of VMware Tanzu that was announced at DevOps Loop 2021.

Bitbucket Pipelines provides a Docker caching feature that can help improve build times. However, the limitation is that only compressed caches under 1GB are saved and can be used. In this blog, we outline a process showing how you can use compressed caches that are larger than 1GB. With Docker versions >= 19.03, you can use the BuildKit feature. With BuildKit, you don’t need to keep the cache locally before building the Docker image since it caches each build layer in your image registry.

After a week in sunny Southern California, KubeCon North America 2021 is a wrap in Los Angeles. For many of us, KubeCon was the first in-person event we have attended since the start of the pandemic. Though this year, KubeCon is a hybrid event even if you missed the in-person talks, you can still catch the virtual talks online. Compared to KubeCons of years gone by, the event has been scaled back slightly to respect social distancing and slowly easing folks back into in-person conferences.

A comparison of EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher and OpenShift from an SRE’s perspective.