General note concerning the use of guest agent interfaces:

"unsupported" is a higher-level error than the errors that individual commands might document. The caller should always be prepared to receive QERR_UNSUPPORTED, even if the given command doesn’t specify it, or doesn’t document any failure mode at all.

The cloud native landscape can be complicated and confusing. Its myriad of open source projects are supported by the constant contributions of a vibrant and expansive community. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has a landscape map that shows the full extent of cloud native solutions, many of which are under their umbrella.

As a CNCF ambassador, I am actively engaged in promoting community efforts and cloud native education throughout Canada. At CloudOps I lead workshops on Docker and Kubernetes that provide an introduction to cloud native technologies and help DevOps teams operate their applications.

I also organize Kubernetes and Cloud Native meetups that bring in speakers from around the world and represent a variety of projects. They are run quarterly in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Quebec City. Reach out to me @archyufaor email CloudOps to learn more about becoming cloud native.

In the meantime, I have written a beginners guide to the cloud native landscape. I hope that it will help you understand the landscape and give you a better sense of how to navigate it.

NATS Server is a simple, high performance open source messaging system for cloud native applications, IoT messaging, and microservices architectures.

Romana is a network and security automation solution for cloud native applications. Romana automates the creation of isolated cloud native networks, secures applications using microsegmentation and enforces access control policies on all endpoints, wherever they run.

Romana is network agnostic and secures applications using standard networking techniques so they can be deployed easily on public and private clouds, and even across the Internet.

Applications that run with Romana are easier to operate and deliver higher performance than when using a virtual network overlay. With Romana, an overlay is never required, even across availability zone boundaries. Romana’s innovative approach enables seamless hybrid cloud deployment and lets container orchestration systems transparently scale capacity across private and public clouds worldwide.

Integration with Kubernetes and other cloud orchestration systems lets application developers use their existing tools and workflow to secure their applications with the deployment flexibility they need.

Romana is all open source and is deployed successfully today on servers running thousands of container workloads by operators of some of the largest on-line applications. Romana lets you deploy cloud native applications securely on isolated networks with policy based control. Romana runs in any IaaS, so developers running Kubernetes in a public cloud now have a way to apply network and security policies to all pod communications.

Helm helps you manage Kubernetes applications — Helm Charts helps you define, install, and upgrade even the most complex Kubernetes application.

Charts are easy to create, version, share, and publish — so start using Helm and stop the copy-and-paste madness.

The latest version of Helm is maintained by the CNCF - in collaboration with Microsoft, Google, Bitnami and the Helm contributor community.

This guide is for people who want to craft a custom Kubernetes cluster. If you can find an existing Getting Started Guide that meets your needs on this list, then we recommend using it, as you will be able to benefit from the experience of others. However, if you have specific IaaS, networking, configuration management, or operating system requirements not met by any of those guides, then this guide will provide an outline of the steps you need to take. Note that it requires considerably more effort than using one of the pre-defined guides.

This guide is also useful for those wanting to understand at a high level some of the steps that existing cluster setup scripts are making.

MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols.

Why?

Kubernetes does not offer an implementation of network load-balancers (Services of type LoadBalancer) for bare metal clusters. The implementations of Network LB that Kubernetes does ship with are all glue code that calls out to various IaaS platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure…). If you’re not running on a supported IaaS platform (GCP, AWS, Azure…), LoadBalancers will remain in the “pending” state indefinitely when created.

Bare metal cluster operators are left with two lesser tools to bring user traffic into their clusters, “NodePort” and “externalIPs” services. Both of these options have significant downsides for production use, which makes bare metal clusters second class citizens in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

MetalLB aims to redress this imbalance by offering a Network LB implementation that integrates with standard network equipment, so that external services on bare metal clusters also “just work” as much as possible.

This page explains two different approaches to setting up a highly available Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm:

With stacked masters. This approach requires less infrastructure. etcd members and control plane nodes are co-located.
With an external etcd cluster. This approach requires more infrastructure. The control plane nodes and etcd members are separated.

Your clusters must run Kubernetes version 1.11 or later. You should also be aware that setting up HA clusters with kubeadm is still experimental. You might encounter issues with upgrading your clusters, for example. We encourage you to try either approach, and provide feedback.

Fluent Bit is an open source and multi-platform Log Processor and Forwarder which allows you to collect data/logs from different sources, unify and send them to multiple destinations. It's fully compatible with Docker and Kubernetes environments.

Fluent Bit is written in C, have a pluggable architecture supporting around 30 extensions. It's fast and lightweight and provide the required security for network operations through TLS.

Add-ons extend the functionality of Kubernetes.

This page lists some of the available add-ons and links to their respective installation instructions.

Add-ons in each section are sorted alphabetically - the ordering does not imply any preferential status.

kubeadm helps you bootstrap a minimum viable Kubernetes cluster that conforms to best practices. With kubeadm, your cluster should pass Kubernetes Conformance tests. Kubeadm also supports other cluster lifecycle functions, such as upgrades, downgrade, and managing bootstrap tokens.

Because you can install kubeadm on various types of machine (e.g. laptop, server, Raspberry Pi, etc.), it’s well suited for integration with provisioning systems such as Terraform or Ansible.

kubeadm’s simplicity means it can serve a wide range of use cases:

New users can start with kubeadm to try Kubernetes out for the first time.
Users familiar with Kubernetes can spin up clusters with kubeadm and test their applications.
Larger projects can include kubeadm as a building block in a more complex system that can also include other installer tools.

kubeadm is designed to be a simple way for new users to start trying Kubernetes out, possibly for the first time, a way for existing users to test their application on and stitch together a cluster easily, and also to be a building block in other ecosystem and/or installer tool with a larger scope.

You can install kubeadm very easily on operating systems that support installing deb or rpm packages. The responsible SIG for kubeadm, SIG Cluster Lifecycle, provides these packages pre-built for you, but you may also on other OSes.

This blog offers some guidelines for running a production grade Kubernetes cluster in an environment like an on-premise data center or edge location.

What does it mean to be “production grade”?

The installation is secure
The deployment is managed with a repeatable and recorded process
Performance is predictable and consistent
Updates and configuration changes can be safely applied
Logging and monitoring is in place to detect and diagnose failures and resource shortages
Service is “highly available enough” considering available resources, including constraints on money, physical space, power, etc.
A recovery process is available, documented, and tested for use in the event of failures

In short, production grade means anticipating accidents and preparing for recovery with minimal pain and delay.

This article is directed at on-premise Kubernetes deployments on a hypervisor or bare-metal platform, facing finite backing resources compared to the expansibility of the major public clouds. However, some of these recommendations may also be useful in a public cloud if budget constraints limit the resources you choose to consume.

A single node bare-metal Minikube deployment may be cheap and easy, but is not production grade. Conversely, you’re not likely to achieve Google’s Borg experience in a retail store, branch office, or edge location, nor are you likely to need it.

This blog offers some guidance on achieving a production worthy Kubernetes deployment, even when dealing with some resource constraints.

Weave Net creates a virtual network that connects Docker containers across multiple hosts and enables their automatic discovery. With Weave Net, portable microservices-based applications consisting of multiple containers can run anywhere: on one host, multiple hosts or even across cloud providers and data centers. Applications use the network just as if the containers were all plugged into the same network switch, without having to configure port mappings, ambassadors or links.

Services provided by application containers on the weave network can be exposed to the outside world, regardless of where they are running. Similarly, existing internal systems can be opened to accept connections from application containers irrespective of their location.

On layer 2 networks, high availability can be achieved by:

• antique protocols, like the Spanning Tree Protocol,
• proprietary protocols, like Juniper’s virtual chassis, Cisco’s virtual port channel and other MC-LAG implementations,1
• standardized protocols, like Shortest Path Bridging Protocol or TRILL, or
• the underlying network (in the case of an overlay network, like VXLAN).

High-end hardware at sensational prices! Our cloud servers are located in our own state-of-the-art data centers and provide top performance with their Intel Skylake Xeon CPUs and speedy NVMe SSDs for all your resource-intensive projects.

Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers. We give system administrators the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy applications, and proactively manage servers, on-premise or in the cloud.

Provision from anywhere

Bare metal, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, Libvirt, oVirt, VMware, and many other providers allow you to manage a hybrid cloud through Foreman

Configuration

An external node classifier, hiera-like parameters, and reports monitoring for Puppet, Salt and Chef are included. Completely ready to tweak host groups in your data center.