Tech News - DevOps

Rackspace recently announced the launch of its Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering which would be  implemented to its private cloud clients worldwide, this month. It claims this service would be soon coming to public cloud later this year. Rackspace, which is a managed-cloud computing company, revealed that it will fully operate and manage the Kubernetes deployment, including the infrastructure. It also claimed that users can save up to 50% when compared to other open source system deployments. So, if you are looking at automating deployments, scaling, and managing containerized applications then, Kubernetes is your open-source option. It is the most efficient way of running online software across a vast range of machines. Kubernetes is becoming a leading player in cloud container orchestration, where bigger players like Microsoft Azure and Cisco have started adopting its services. Not all businesses comply with the internal resources and expertise needed to effectively manage a Kubernetes environment on their own. By delivering a fully managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, Rackspace allows organizations to focus more on building and running their applications. With the new service, Rackspace delivers an enhanced level of ongoing operations management and support for the entire technology stack. This support ranges from the hardware to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Kubernetes. Rackspace also claims that the key benefits of this offering include Support for operations such as Updates, Upgrades, Patching and security hardening, and The ability to use a single platform to deploy Kubernetes clusters across private and public clouds. Ensures that a customer always has access to an entire team of specialists 24*7*365 Rackspace experts fully validate and inspect each component of the service, provide static container scanning and enable customers to restrict user access to the environment. This is just an overview of Rackspace’s  extended support to Kubernetes-as-a-Service. You can know more about this new offering from the Rackspace blog. What Google, RedHat, Oracle, and others announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 How to secure a private cloud using IAM Google’s kaniko – An open-source build tool for Docker Images in Kubernetes, without a root access

We've teamed up with Humble Bundle once again to bring you a selection of some of our very best DevOps eBooks and videos for incredible prices. But more than that, we're also giving you the chance to support some really important charities while picking up the content you want. Go to Humble Bundle now. Get up to $1613 worth of DevOps eBooks and videos for $15! There are a diverse range of titles in the Humble Bundle. They cover all the essential components within the DevOps toolchain. This includes Automate It!, DevOps with Kubernetes, Deployment with Docker, and Ansible 2 for Beginners. With DevOps becoming an increasingly important to the way everyone builds software, this bundle of resources could prove vital for people even outside of sys admin type roles (apparently we're all sys admins now anyway). Pay at least $1 to pick up... Automate It! Effective DevOps with AWS DevOps for Web Developers [Video] Deployment with Docker Docker and Kubernetes for Java Developers Deploying and Running Docker Containers [Video] Linux Shell Scripting Solutions [Video] Three months subscription to Mapt pro for $30 ...Or pay at least $8 to get the titles above and... Ansible 2 for Beginners [Video] Practical Network Automation DevOps for Networking DevOps with Kubernetes Windows Server 2016 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook, Second Edition Learning Continuous Integration with Jenkins, Second Edition Getting Started with Kubernetes, Second Edition Mastering Puppet for Large Infrastructures [Video] ...Or pay at least $15 to get all of that and... Mastering Ansible, Second Edition Mastering DevOps [Video] Mastering Docker, Second Edition Getting Started with Docker [Video] Continuous Delivery with Docker and Jenkins Mastering Kubernetes Learning Kubernetes [Video] OpenStack Administration with Ansible 2, Second Edition Mastering Windows PowerShell 5 Administration [Video] Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide, Third Edition The Humble Bundle expires on 21 May 2018. So be quick and grab the DevOps eBooks and videos you want!

Google recently introduced kaniko, an open-source tool for building container images from a Dockerfile even without privileged root access. Prior to kaniko, building images from a standard Dockerfile typically was totally dependent on an interactive access to a Docker daemon, which requires a root access on the machine to run. Such a process makes it difficult to build container images in environments that can’t easily or securely expose their Docker daemons, such as Kubernetes clusters. To combat these challenges, Kaniko was created. With kaniko, one can build an image from a Dockerfile and push it to a registry. Since it doesn’t require any special privileges or permissions, kaniko can even run in a standard Kubernetes cluster, Google Kubernetes Engine, or in any environment that can’t have access to privileges or a Docker daemon. How does kaniko Build Tool work? kaniko runs as a container image that takes in three arguments: a Dockerfile, a build context and the name of the registry to which it should push the final image. The image is built from scratch, and contains only a static Go binary plus the configuration files needed for pushing and pulling images.kaniko image generation The kaniko executor takes care of extracting the base image file system into the root. It executes each command in order, and takes a snapshot of the file system after each command. The snapshot is created in the user area where the file system is running and compared to the previous state that is in memory. All changes in the file system are appended to the base image, making relevant changes in the metadata of the image. After successful execution of each command in the Dockerfile, the executor pushes the newly built image to the desired registry. Finally, Kaniko unpacks the filesystem, executes commands and takes snapshots of the filesystem completely in user-space within the executor image. This is how it avoids requiring privileged access on your machine. Here, the docker daemon or CLI is not involved. To know more about how to run kaniko in a Kubernetes Cluster, and in the Google Cloud Container Builder, read the documentation on the GitHub Repo. The key differences between Kubernetes and Docker Swarm Building Docker images using Dockerfiles What’s new in Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0?

Jenkins is loved by many as the open source automation server, that provides different plugins  to support building, deploying, and automating any project. However, Jenkins is not a cloud-native tool, i.e., it lacks the OOTB (Out-Of-The-Box) capabilities to survive an outage, and scale seamlessly, among many other flaws. In order to make Jenkins cloud native, the team has come up with a brand new Jenkins X platform, an open source CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications, which would be deployed on Kubernetes. Jenkins X is currently a sub-project within the Jenkins Foundation. It fully focuses on Kubernetes, CI/CD and Cloud Native use cases for providing great developer productivity. With the Kubernetes plugin, one does not have to worry about provisioning VMs or physical servers for slaves. The target audience for Jenkins X include both the existing as well as new Jenkins users. It is specifically designed for those who are, Already using Kubernetes and want to adopt CI/CD, or Want to adopt CI/CD and want to increasingly move to the public cloud, even if they don’t know anything about Kubernetes. Key Features of Jenkins X An automated Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery(CD) tool: Jenkins X does not require one to have a deep knowledge of the internals of a Jenkins pipeline. It provides a default setting and the best-fit pipelines for one’s projects, which would implement CI and CD fully. Automated management of the Environments: Jenkins X automates the management of the environments and the promotion of new versions of applications between environments, which each team gets, via GitOps. Automated Preview Environments: Jenkins X provides preview environments automatically for one’s pull requests. With this, one can get a faster feedback before changes are merged to master. Feedback on Issues and Pull Requests: Jenkins X automatically comments on Commits, Issues and Pull Requests with feedback when, Code is ready to be previewed, Code is promoted to environments, or If Pull Requests are generated automatically to upgrade versions. Some other notable features of Jenkins X are : Jenkins X uses a distribution of Jenkins as the core CI / CD engine. It also promotes a particular Git branching and repository model and includes tools and services, present within the distribution, to fit this model. The Jenkins X development model represents "best practice of developing Kubernetes applications", which is based in part on the experience of developing Fabric8, a project with a similar mission and on the results of the State of DevOps report. The advantage of Jenkins X is that if one follows the best practices, Jenkins X assembles all the pieces by itself, for instance, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD etc. such that developers can be instantly productive. Jenkins X is shipped with K8s pipelines, agents, and integrations. This makes migrations to Kubernetes and microservices way simpler. jx: Jenkins X CLI tool Jenkins X also defines a command line tool, jx. This tool encapsulates tasks as high-level operations. Its CLI is used not only by developers from their computers, but also used by Jenkins Pipeline. It is a central user interface which allows: Easy installation of Jenkins X on any kubernetes cluster Create new Kubernetes clusters from scratch on the public cloud Set up Environments for each Team Import existing projects or create new Spring Boot applications and later: automatically set up the CI / CD pipeline and webhooks create new releases and promote them through the Environments on merge to master support Preview Environments on Pull Requests Read further more on Jenkins X on its official website.    

Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0 was released yesterday. The major focus of this new release (and the platform as a whole) is speeding up multi-cloud initiatives and automating the application delivery model, that go hand-in hand with DevOps and Agile philosophy. Docker has become an important tool for businesses in a very short space of time. With Docker EE 2.0, it looks like Docker will consolidate its position as the go-to containerization tool for enterprise organizations. Key features of Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0 Let’s look at some of the key capabilities included in Docker EE 2.0 release. Docker EE 2.0 is incredibly flexible  Flexibility is one of the biggest assets of Docker Enterprise Edition as today’s software delivery ecosystem demands freedom of choice. Organizations that are building applications on different platforms, using varied set of tools, deploying on different infrastructures and running them on different set of platforms require a huge amount of flexibility. Docker EE has addressed this concern with the following capabilities: Multi-Linux, Multi-OS, Multi-Cloud Many organizations have adopted a Hybrid cloud or Multi-cloud strategy, and build applications on different operating systems. Docker EE is registered across all the popular set of operating systems such as Windows, all the popular Linux distributions, Windows Server, and also on popular public clouds, enabling the users to deploy applications flexibly, wherever required. Docker EE 2.0 is interoperable with Docker Swarm and Kubernetes Container orchestration forms the core of DevOps and the entire ecosystem of containers revolve around Swarm or Kubernetes. Docker EE allows flexibility is switching between both these tools for application deployment and orchestration. Applications deployed on Swarm today, can be easily migrated to Kubernetes using the same compose file, making the life of developers simpler. Accelerating agile with Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0 Docker EE focuses on monitoring and managing containers to much greater extent than the open source version of Docker. The Enterprise Edition has specialized management and monitoring platform for looking after Kubernetes cluster and also has access to Kubernetes API, CLI and interfaces. Cluster management made simple: Easy-to-use cluster management services: Basic single line commands for adding cluster High availability of management plane Access to consoles and logs Securing configurations Secure application zones: With swift integration with corporate LDAPs and Active Directory system, we can divide a single cluster logically and physically into different teams. This seems to be the most convenient way to assign new namespaces to Kubernetes clusters. Layer 7 routing for Swarm: The new interlock 2.0 architecture provides new and optimized enhancements for network routing in Swarm. For more information on interlock architecture, refer the official Docker blog. Kubernetes: All the core components of Kubernetes environment like APIs, CLIs are available for users in a CCNF- conformant Kubernetes stack. There were few more enhancements related to the supply chain and security domains. For the complete set of improvements to Docker, check out the official Docker EE documentation.

In an effort to sync their releases with Kubernetes, RedHat skipped 3.8 release and came up with version 3.9, for their very own container application platform i.e OpenShift. RedHat seems to be moving really quick with their OpenShift roadmap, with 3.10 release lined up in Q2 2018 (June). The primary takeaway from the accelerated release cycle of OpenShift is the importance of the tool in RedHat DevOps expansion. With dedicated support to cutting-edge tools like Docker and Kubernetes, OpenShift looks like a strong DevOps tool, which is here to stay. The OpenShift 3.9 release has quite a few exciting middleware updates, bug fixes, and service extensions. Let’s look at some of the enhancements in key areas:   Container Orchestration OpenShift has added Soft Image Pruning, wherein you don't have to remove the actual image, but need to just update the etcd storage file instead. Added support to deploy RedHat ClouForms on OpenShift container engine. Added features: OpenShift Container Platform template provisioning Offline OpenScapScans Alert management: You can choose Prometheus (currently in Technology Preview) and use it in CloudForms. Reporting enhancements Provider updates Chargeback enhancements UX enhancements The inclusion of CRI-O V1.9, a lightweight native Kubernetes run-time interface. Addition of CRI-O brings the following advancements: A minimal and secure architecture. Excellent scale and performance. The ability to run any Open Container Initiative (OCI) or docker image. Familiar operational tooling and commands. Storage Expand persistent volume claims online from {product-tile} for CNS glusterFS, Cinder, and GCE PD. CNS deployments are automated and CNS Un-install Playbook is added with the release of OpenShift 3.9 Developer Experience Improvements in Jenkins support, which intelligently predicts to pod memory before processing it. Updated CLI-plugins or binary extensions, which extends the default set of OC commands, allowing you to perform a new task. The BUILDCONFIG DEFAULTER now allows specifications now allows a toleration value, which is applied upon creation. For minor bug fixes and the complete release data, refer to  OpenShift Release Notes.  

Kubernetes has announced their first release of 2018: Kubernetes 1.10. This release majorly focuses on stabilizing 3 key areas which include storage, security, and networking. Kubernetes is an open-source system, initially designed by Google and at present is maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which helps in automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Storage - CSI and Local Storage move to beta: In this version, you will find: The Container Storage Interface (CSI) moves to beta. One can install new volume plugins similar to deploying a pod. This helps third-party storage providers to develop independent solutions outside the core Kubernetes codebase. Local storage management has also progressed to beta, enabling locally attached storage available as a persistent volume source. This assures lower-cost and higher performance for distributed file systems and databases. Security - External credential providers (alpha): Complementing the Cloud Controller Manager feature added in 1.9 Kubernetes has extended its feature with the addition of External credential providers in 1.10. This enables Cloud providers and other platform developers to release binary plugins to handle authentication for specific cloud-provider Identity Access Management services. Networking - CoreDNS as a DNS provider (beta): Kubernetes now provides the ability to switch the DNS service to CoreDNS during installation. CoreDNS is a single process that can now supports more use cases. To get a complete list of additional features of this release visit the Changelog. Check out other related posts: The key differences between Kubernetes and Docker Swarm Apache Spark 2.3 now has native Kubernetes support! OpenShift 3.9 released ahead of planned schedule