When I left Red Hat to join SUSE as a Technical Marketing Manager at the end of 2021, I heard about Harvester, a new Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution with Kubernetes under the hood. When I started looking at it, I immediately saw use cases where Harvester could really help IT operators and DevOps engineers. There are solutions that offer similar capabilities but there’s nothing else on the market like Harvester.

The release of Rancher Desktop 1.3.0 brings in some notable changes that are most visible on Mac and Linux while continuing to expand on experimental features.

In the era of Microservices, Cloud Computing and Serverless architecture, it’s useful to understand Kubernetes and learn how to use it. However, the official Kubernetes documentation can be hard to decipher, especially for newcomers. In this blog series, I will present a simplified view of Kubernetes and give examples of how to use it for deploying microservices using different cloud providers, including Azure, Amazon, Google Cloud and even IBM.

Recently microservices-based applications became very popular and with the rise of microservices, the concept of Service Mesh also became a very hot topic. Unfortunately, there are only a few articles about this concept and most of them are hard to digest.

Cloud native is a term that’s been around for many years but really started gaining traction in 2015 and 2016. This could be attributed to the rise of Docker, which was released a few years prior. Still, many organizations started becoming more aware of the benefits of running their workloads in the cloud. Whether because of cost savings or ease of operations, companies were increasingly looking into whether they should be getting on this “cloud native” trend.

Having multiple environments that can be dynamically configured has become akin to modern software development. This is especially true in an enterprise context where the software release cycles typically consist of separate compute environments like dev, stage and production. These environments are usually distinguished by data that drives the specific behavior of the application.

Kubernetes is a rich ecosystem, and the native YAML or JSON manifest files remain a popular way to deploy applications. YAML’s support for multi-document files makes it often possible to describe complex applications with a single file. The Kubernetes CLI also allows for many individual YAML or JSON files to be applied at once by referencing their parent directory, reducing most Kubernetes deployments to a single kubectl call.