As you may have heard a few months ago, Docker announced a change to its pricing model that will only affect Docker Desktop for enterprises starting in February 2022. This article takes this as an opportunity to talk about Docker alternatives. One focus is Docker Desktop. Even if the pricing changes do not affect you, I am sure there is something in here for you. First, we will refresh our memory about Docker and discuss Weiterlesen…
The CNCF (cloud-native computing foundation) and The Linux Foundation, had introduced a new Kubernetes exam in November 2021. The exam is called Kubernetes and Cloud-native Associate (KCNA). Looking through the exam format and exam domain, made me curious to sit for the certification, for reason number one, which was the exam format. The Exam Format The exam is a multiple-choice test that consists of 60 questions. You have 90 minutes to complete the exam and must get at least 75% or above to succeed in it. I had the Weiterlesen…
Developing comprehensive tagging strategies for your cloud resources to achieve transparency in cost allocation. Tagging as a tool to transform metadata into usable data is by no means a new concept. It may sound simple, but one should carefully consider what information to gather before adding metadata to your cloud resources. The journey to effective cost management may not be as straightforward as one thinks. The reason is that the people deploying, using and managing Weiterlesen…
Dapr – a toolbox for distributed systems The growing complexity of distributed, containerized systems presents many developers with new challenges. This creates new interfaces within an application, which also require new approaches for the integration. Further problems arise not only technically but also organizationally for projects and their operation. Essentially, this raises some questions. Who must provide the necessary systems for the integration layer within a distributed application? Who manages this layer? Who is responsible Weiterlesen…
Introduction In February 2021, I started working at Liquid Reply and consequently with Kubernetes. Kubernetes’ concepts, ideas, and workflows were entirely new to me. My previous jobs in the last decade were all in the field of classic Linux administration. I did everything from provisioning to decommission computing, storage, and networking hardware in data center environments. I managed Linux workstations, maintained a custom Linux kernel as well as custom packages. That is the reason why Weiterlesen…
Gathering metrics and logs from your applications is usually not enough. You want to receive alerts if something is suspicious and then investigate in a dashboard solution like Grafana or Kibana. At Liquid Reply, we had to find a solution to send our alerts from the Alertmanager to Microsoft Teams. Our initial setup consisted of Prometheus, which is gathering all the metrics, and Alertmanager that was attached to Prometheus. This Alertmanager was sending notifications to Weiterlesen…
FinOps brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality. FinOps definition at Cloud FinOps by J.R. Storment; Mike Fuller tl;dr: Writing FinOps-guided governance policies will help with your Cloud Cost Optimization. In this post, we spend some time trying to use simple words in order to explain the concept of FinOps, as well as Policy-as-Code. What is FinOps The term FinOps Weiterlesen…
To me, Traceability is basically logging but in a better and more structured context. In the first part of this series, we discussed the history of distributed systems and microservices, giving Amazon website as an example of how the microservices would look like and inter-communication between them all. Moving forward, what to use to debug a service request that goes through many microservices and you want to correlate all of the events and transactions that Weiterlesen…
“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it” Albert Einstein once said that. Now imagine that this planet in this scenario is your system which you’re responsible for operating and maintaining the availability and durability of the system. Where probably a system contains several functions are communication to each other and you can’t possibly identify what went wrong or where. Imagine you just received an issue that a service Weiterlesen…
Many enterprise customers are using ELK to store the logs from their Kubernetes clusters. Others are using solutions the cloud provider offers like Stackdriver or Cloudwatch. While ELK is difficult to configure and to operate, managed solutions are quite easy to use but they lead into a Vendor Lock-In. Both solution models are quite expensive if you want to store a big number of logs and if you have more than a few Kubernetes clusters. Weiterlesen…
