Posts

  • Kubernetes for Developers - Part 4: Monitoring

    Kubernetes offers a powerful API that allow workloads to discover other services and pods within Kubernetes. The kube-prometheus stack takes advantage of this to discover information about running workloads, monitor them, and report on their performance.

    kube-prometheus is made up of a lot of different components that work together; kube-state-metrics collects metrics about your cluster, prometheus queries kube-state-metrics and your own applications to collect statistics and store them in a database, alertmanager sends emails or other alerts when certain metrics exceed certain tolerances, and finally grafana is used to pull all this together into dashboards.

  • Kubernetes for Developers - Part 3: Volumes and Autoscaling

    In part two, we deployed a service to EKS and set up an Ingress. In this section, we’re going to discuss provisioning volumes, StatefulSets, and autoscaling.

  • Node.JS: Upgrading indirect dependencies

    You want to install an npm package - let’s say amqp-connection-manager. This particular package has a dependency on another package called promise-breaker, so when you install ampq-connection-manager, promise-breaker gets installed automatically (although you won’t see it in your package.json). Now let’s suppose there’s a security vulnerability in promise-breaker. You want to upgrade promise-breaker, but it isn’t even in your package.json! How do you go about doing this?

  • Kubernetes for Developers - Part 2: EKS and Ingress

    In part one, we created a service and we learned how to connect to our service from inside the cluster, and how to connect to it from outside the cluster with with port forwarding - how would we go about exposing this service on the Internet?

    The answer is a Kubernetes resource called an Ingress, which describes how traffic gets into your cluster and which services traffic gets routed to. There are lots of different kinds of Ingress to choose from - you get to pick one and install it on your cluster. What an Ingress looks like in terms of network architecture will depend very much on which Ingress you choose.

    If you were to install ingress-nginx, for example, then your ingress would consist of nginx running in several pods within your cluster (and then some method for getting all inbound traffic to those nginx pods, so it can distribute it to your services). Traefik-ingress is another popular choice, because of it’s built in support for fetching certificates from LetsEncrypt. In this tutorial, we’re going to use AWS and EKS, so we’re going to go the simple route and install the AWS load balancer controller, which will create ALBs for our ingress traffic.

    In order to do that, we’re going to set up a cluster on AWS’s EKS service, then we’re going to learn probably more than we want to know about security and Service Accounts, and we’ll learn how to set up an Ingress. We’ll also look at how to automatically configure a DNS entry for our service in Route 53 and setup SSL with a certificate from AWS.

  • Kubernetes for Developers - Part 1: Introduction to Kubernetes

    This series is a practical introduction to Kubernetes and Amazon’s EKS. I come from the developer side of things, rather than the ops side of things, so this is written from that perspective. In this first tutorial, we’re going to discuss some basic Kubernetes concepts and play around with a local cluster running in a VM. This tutorial assumes you are already somewhat familiar with Docker - if you know how to write a Dockerfile, and run an application in Docker, (or at least understand what those concepts are) you should be good.

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