Hello Cloud Gurus! I'm Nigel Poulton and welcome to Kubernetes This Month.
Here's what we've got on the agenda.
We'll do our usual round up of the major Kubernetes events from the last month.
We'll pick a couple of those and dive deeper.
Then we'll finish up with your chance to win a goody bag through our Guru of the
Month quiz. So sit back and get ready to enjoy!
First on the list in our news and catch-up section this month,
the CNCF has released its 2019 annual report.
Now the highlights are growth, growth, growth, and Kubernetes is the future.
But we'll take a closer look in the Deeper Dive section.
On a more technical note, the Kubernetes blog has an article about KubeInvaders,
and yes, this is as cool as it sounds.
So KubeInvaders is a cool little project from Euginio Marzo aimed at making
testing the resiliency of your Kubernetes clusters fun.
So basically, it's gamified chaos engineering...
Space invaders style!
Dell's EMC Isilon scale-out NAS platform now has a CSI plugin.
Now this shows the maturity of the container storage interface,
the CSI and a healthy buy-in from the vendor community.
VMware announced that the first previews of project Nautilus are available in
the latest Fusion Pro Tech Preview.
This is an early preview that runs containers on a Mac with the goal being that
a future edition will run full Kubernetes clusters on your desktop.
So creating a world right,
where containers run side-by-side as equals with VMs on your desktop.
Google announced Config Connector.
This runs as a Kubernetes operator and makes GCP resources look and feel like
Kubernetes resources that can be managed in a declarative way.
The aim being to make Kubernetes more and more the standard tool of choice.
Plus, saving developers from learning a million and one tools and systems.
Sticking with Google for a second. GKE,
the Google Kubernetes Engine has been benchmarked against the CIS Kubernetes
benchmark and we'll talk more about that later in our deeper dive section.
Rancher Labs has released K3C and I'm not aware of any pronunciation guide on
this one,
but it is a super-lightweight Docker replacement for Kubernetes environments.
So,
Kubernetes orchestrates containers and behind the scenes it leans on a container
runtime to do things like starting and stopping containers. For the most part,
it's still uses Docker for this,
but K3C is one of an increasing number of smaller,
more focused runtimes that are looking to replace Docker in the Kubernetes
world. Now if you follow me on this show, yes it should fit nicely with K3S.
The folks at Grafana, I guess they don't like YAML,
cause they've just released Tanka as a tool to overcome some of the pains and
shortcomings of YAML. So if you know ksonnet,
this is basically a re-write of that and it's probably a good project to take
for a spin, especially if you're not a fan of YAML.
Calico 3.11 was released with support for dual stack Pod IPs.
So that's a Pod with an IPv4 and an IPv6 networking stack.
And last but not least,
the CKAD certification has been brought in line with other Linux foundation and
CNCF certifications. So it is now valid for 3 years. And good news,
this applies to existing certs,
so if you've already passed your CKAD, great!
It now lasts an additional 12 months!
And that rounds up our news and announcements for this month.
in this month's Deeper Dive section we'll look a little bit closer at the CNCF
annual report and the GKE CIS Benchmark.
So the CNCF released its annual 2019 report and I've got to say it's a pretty
easy and a moderately decent read. Plus, there's lots of pictures and diagrams.
The gist of the report though is that everything is growing,
so paid up members is growing, end user community, number of conferences,
number of meetups, adopted projects, everything's on the up.
I would say right, explosive growth would not be an overstatement.
Now,
embedded within the report is a link to the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North
America 2019 transparency report,
which again is more of the same massive growth.
But there are interesting stats on attendee demographics and the likes. So,
we now know that 65% of attendees were first timers yeah.
39% were Developers, with 22% in operations.
We're talking about KubeCon in San Diego here. Well,
45% of people work in the software industry with 51% of attendees working for
larger companies with over 3,000 employees. Kubernetes,
unsurprisingly right,
was the project that most people were interested in with Prometheus and Envoy in
second and third places.
There's also data comparing to previous events and some financials relating to
diversity scholarships.
Though I found it interesting that there weren't more financials considering
it's called a transparency report, but overall it was an interesting read.
Now then, with rapid growth usually comes growing pains. It's to be expected,
nobody's perfect and the CNCF don't claim to be. But,
below the surface as you'd expect,
there are challenges and there's things that aren't always as rosy as the
marketing PDF suggests. That's life right,
and the CNCF marches on.
We're going to wrap up this months Deeper Dive section with a quick look at the
GKE specific CIS Kubernetes Benchmark. So,
at a super high level, the CIS is the Center for Internet Security,
and they publish benchmarks relating to obviously security but also best
practices. And they've got one for Kubernetes.
This works against any cluster based on the open-source upstream Kubernetes.
And if you're serious about the security of your Kubernetes clusters,
you should definitely take a look. However,
a bunch of us are using hosted Kubernetes on platforms like GKE and in
situations like this, the CIS benchmark doesn't quite hit the mark.
I mean there's only so much that's your responsibility on a hosted platform,
right?
And a bunch of the stuff is already taken care of by the platform itself.
So the GKE folks have worked together with the CIS to bring a GKE specific
benchmark that makes it super clear which bits you need to look at and secure,
including GCP specific things,
while leaving out the bits that GKE takes care of. So,
if you're on GKE and you take security seriously, you're in luck.
There's a CIS GKE benchmark tool for you. Now,
this is obviously another example of Google being out there at the front and
leading the way, but I'm sure or at least I hope right,
in the future we'll have the same kind of tools for other hosted platforms.
And that Cloud Gurus, wraps up our Deeper Dive section for this month.
Okay, Guru of the Month.
Last month we asked what was one of the motivations behind the creation of the
container storage interface for Kubernetes and the correct answer was B:
"Storage drivers were previously tied to the release-cycle of Kubernetes".
And our winner this month is Salva Piera.
Salva is a Tech Support Engineer for a storage vendor in Dublin, Ireland,
which I think is kind of appropriate if you think that the question, well,
it was about storage, wasn't it? Anyway look,
Salva - you'll be getting a goody bag from us. And Tom Yates,
the style of your answer did make me smile, nicely done. Anyway,
thanks to everyone for getting involved!
This month's question is in the forum link below, and as always,
I'll see you again next month... Same Kube time, same Kube place!