kubernetes

What is Container Orchestration?

Over the last two or three years I’ve given a similar presentation on containers to operations groups at clients, potential clients, conferences and meetups. Generally, they’re just getting started with containers and are wondering what orchestration is and how it impacts them. In this post, I will talk about what container orchestration is and provide several videos with simple examples of what it means.

What is Container Orchestration? Read More »

Kubernetes Workload Isolation

There are many images of ships with pin-wheel colored containers in a myriad of stacked configurations. In the featured image above you can clearly see three ships at dock loaded with containers. These ships have unique destination port cities across the globe each one carrying a distinct set of product for a discreet set of customers. These containers carry a payload.

Our virtual docker containers carry a workload. So, the ships vary in what containers they carry, where they are transporting it, and for whom it belongs to. We will talk about how to get our virtual containers loaded into a particular ship and entertain one solution to VM and container isolation.


Over the years Capstone has work in many vertical industries. Several of Capstone’s customers have extremely regulated environments such as the banking, insurance, and financial investment industries. These industry verticals typically need to comply with numerous governing standards and often have unique ways of interpreting and applying those regulations to there IT infrastructure. All of these regulations are aimed at restricting, or at least minimizing, covert intrusion.

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SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 3

In the first two posts in this series, SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 1 and SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 2, we saw how to use the Kubernetes LoadBalancer service type to terminate SSL for your application deployed on a Kubernetes cluster in AWS and Azure, respectively. In this post, we will see how this can be done for a Kubernetes cluster anywhere using an Ingress resource.

Rather than using an external load balancer as the AWS and Azure cloud providers do for the LoadBalancer service type, an ingress uses an Ingress Controller to provide load balancing, SSL termination and other services within a Kubernetes cluster. A big advantage of using an ingress is its portability across all clusters regardless of the underlying infrastructure, i.e. cloud, virtualized or bare metal. Until recently, a disadvantage was an ingress only supported HTTP and HTTPS and you would need to use a NodePort service type for other protocols. However, NGINX has added support for other protocols to their ingress controller.

SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 3 Read More »

Kubernetes NetworkPolicies in Docker Enterprise Edition

Kubernetes running under Docker UCP uses the Calico CNI plugin so that you can use Kubernetes NetworkPolicies to control pod to pod communication as well as communication between pods and other network endpoints.

This blog post will walk you through an example of configuring Kubernetes NetworkPolicies. We will block traffic from one namespace into another namespace, while still allowing external traffic to access the “restricted” namespace. As a high-level use case, we will consider the situation where a development team is working on multiple branches of a project, and the pods in the different branches should not be able to communicate with each other. If you are not familiar with the basic concepts of NetworkPolicies, see the Kubernetes documentation here.

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Help! I need to change the pod CIDR in my Kubernetes cluster

 

Your Docker EE Kubernetes cluster has been working great for months. The DevOps team is fully committed to deploying critical applications as Kubernetes workloads using their pipeline, and there are several production applications already deployed in your Kubernetes cluster.

But today the DevOps team tells you something is wrong; they can’t reach a group of internal corporate servers from Kubernetes pods. They can reach those same servers using basic Docker containers and Swarm services. You’re sure its just another firewall misconfiguration and you enlist the help of your network team to fix it. After several hours of troubleshooting, you realize that the problem is that you are using a CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) range for your cluster’s pod CIDR range that overlaps the CIDR range that the servers use.

Help! I need to change the pod CIDR in my Kubernetes cluster Read More »

SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 2

In the first post in this series, SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 1, we saw how to use the Kubernetes LoadBalancer service type to terminate SSL for your application deployed on a Kubernetes cluster in AWS. In this post, we will see how this can be done for a Kubernetes cluster in Azure.

In general, Kubernetes objects are portable across the various types of infrastructure underlying the cluster, i.e. public cloud, private cloud, virtualized, bare metal, etc. However, some objects are implemented through the Kubernetes concept of Cloud Providers. The LoadBalancer service type is one of these. AWS, Azure, and GCP (as well as vSphere, OpenStack and others) all implement a load balancer service using the existing load balancer(s) their cloud service provides. As such, each implementation is different. These differences are accounted for in the annotations to the Service object. For example, here is the specification we used for our service in the previous post.

SSL Options with Kubernetes – Part 2 Read More »