New Kubernetes versions are released multiple times per year, and you must upgrade your EKS cluster periodically to stay up to date. In this blog post we will go over the steps required to safely upgrade your production EKS cluster managed by Terraform. At Blue Matador, we use Terraform to manage most of our AWS infrastructure, and our EKS cluster is no exception. We use the eks module, which provides a lot of functionality for managing your EKS cluster and worker nodes.

In an era where container technologies have taken the industry by storm, one of the most common online searches on the topic of containers is ‘Kubernetes vs Docker’. The relevance and accuracy of this comparison is questionable, as it is not really comparing apples to apples. In this blog post, we will attempt to clarify both terms, present their commonalities and differences, and help users better navigate the ever-growing container ecosystem.

We are very pleased to announce that we have received Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) Validation (CMVP Cert #3702) for the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP). With FIPS validation, U.S. public sector organizations can accelerate adoption of the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform to more quickly and securely build and deploy cloud native applications and services.

Kubernetes typically follows a quarterly release cycle. However, 2020 has been an unprecedented year so far, one that has impacted many contributors and businesses. The Kubernetes community responded to the challenges of 2020 by making some changes to the Kubernetes 1.19 release timeline. These changes extended the release cycle to allow more release candidates to be built while giving the community more time to focus on the enhancements that would be delivered.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual happened online, August 18-20. It was the first virtual KubeCon, due to the coronavirus pandemic. I was happy to attend, although this was the second straight virtual conference I’ve participated in that ran on Amsterdam time. I did make it up for the 4 AM Pacific time start, though, and I was ready to go. As I got settled in, in front of my laptop, I knew I would be missing the hallway track a lot.

Innovation. Scale. Power. These are just a few of the words used to describe the explosive impact that Kubernetes is having on the organizations leveraging it for their innovation efforts. Kubernetes gives organizations the ability to run Kubernetes clusters at scale across different cloud infrastructures and distributions. But as the number of clusters and workloads grow, it can be increasingly difficult to manage and create consistency across your organization’s digital footprint.

In today’s economy, digital assets (applications, data, and processes) determine business success. Cloud-native applications are designed to iterate rapidly, creating rapid time-to-value for businesses. Organizations that are able to rapidly build and deploy their applications have significant competitive advantage.

As a network of microservices changes and grows, the interactions between them can be difficult to manage and understand. That’s why it’s handy to have a service mesh as a separate infrastructure layer. A service mesh is an approach to solving microservices at scale. It handles routing and terminating traffic, monitoring and tracing, service delivery and routing, load balancing, circuit breaking and mutual authentication.

Canonical today announced full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.19 spanning from public cloud to the edge, covering Charmed Kubernetes, MicroK8s and kubeadm. “As with all releases, Canonical is committed to fast following so that users benefit from the latest features, lifecycle operations and enterprise support in line with the upstream. With Kubernetes 1.19, MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes also bring enhanced security and carrier grade features.

ChartCenter is a free Helm chart central repository that was built to help the Helm community find immutable, secure, and reliable charts for publicly available Kubernetes apps. With ChartCenter, you have a single source of truth to proxy all public charts from one, always available location. Without ChartCenter, you need to add each Helm chart’s repository to the Helm client for every Kubernetes app you want to install and update.