Tanzu KubernetestaTanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.4 is all set to be released today. A lot of new features are coming up with this release including (not limited to):

• K8’s versions including 1.21.2, 1.20.8, and 1.19.12 are supported with the 1.4 release.
• Support for NSX Advanced Load Balancer versions 20.1.3 & 20.1.6. 
• New vSphere configuration variables “VSPHERE_REGION” and “VSPHERE_ZONE” are added to enable CSI storage for workload clusters in vSphere environments with multiple data centers or clusters.
• Supports L7 ingress (using NSX ALB) for workload clusters.
• AKO deployment is fully automated. No need to install it via helm or using custom yaml for deployment as both AKO and AKO Operator are provided as core packages. 

It’s a good time to upgrade TKG in the lab and through this blog post, I will walk through the steps of upgrading TKGm from v1.3 to v1.4. 

Upgrade Procedure

Step 1: Download and install the new version of the Tanzu CLI and Kubectl on the bootstrapper machine. … Read More

Introduction

Monitoring is the most important part of any infrastructure. Day-2 operations are heavily dependent on the monitoring/alerting/logging aspects. Containerized applications are now part of almost every environment and monitoring Kubernetes cluster eases the management of containerized infrastructure by tracking utilization of cluster resources.

As a Kubernetes operator, you would want to receive alerts if the desired number of pods are not running, if the resource utilization is approaching critical limits, or when failures or misconfiguration cause pods or nodes to become unable to participate in the cluster.

Why Kubernetes monitoring is a challenge?

Kubernetes abstracts away a lot of complexity to speed up application deployment; but in the process, it leaves you blind as to what is actually happening behind the scenes, what resources are being utilized, and even the cost implications of the actions being taken. In a Kubernetes world, the number of components is typically more than traditional infrastructure, which makes root cause analysis more difficult when things go wrong.… Read More

Monitoring is one of the most important aspects of a production deployment. Logs are the savior when things go haywire in the environment, so capturing event logs from the infrastructure pieces is very critical. Day-2 operations become easy if you have comprehensive logging and alerting mechanism in place as it allows for a quick response to failures in infrastructure. 

With the increasing footprint of K8 workloads in the datacenter, centralized monitoring for K8 is a must configure thing. The application developers who are focused on developing and deploying containerized applications are usually not well versed with backend infrastructure.

So if a developer finds any errors in the application logs, they might not find out that the issue is causing because of an infrastructure event in the backend, because centralized logging is not in place and infrastructure logs are stored in a different location than the application logs.

The application and infrastructure logs should be aggregated so that it’s easier to identify the real problem that’s affecting the application. … Read More

Introduction

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid can be configured with a private registry for the rapid deployment of K8 workloads. Although there are a variety of container and artifact registries out there, Harbor has drawn attention because of its accessibility and ease of use, and rich feature set.

Although public registries are out there on the internet, they might contain everything you are looking for. In that case, you can create a custom Harbor registry to push custom K8 images to be used within your organization. A standalone Harbor registry is a perfect use case for an air-gapped TKG deployment.

In my last post, I have documented the steps of deploying a private Harbor registry for TKG. This post will show how you can leverage the registry to push/pull images for your K8 deployment. 

I have created a new project (named manish) in Harbor and I will be pushing images in that custom project.… Read More

Introduction

Harbor is an open-source registry that is used to store the containerized images that will be consumed by the Docker/Kubernetes platform. The images stored in the Harbor registry are secured using policies and role-based access control. Harbor, delivers compliance, performance, and interoperability to help you consistently and securely manage artifacts across cloud-native compute platforms like Kubernetes and Docker.

Why harbor

Harbor not only provides a container registry but also can do vulnerability scanning and trust signing of your docker images. It also has a really smooth web interface that allows you to do things like RBAC, project creation, user management, and more.

Harbor supports the replication of images between registries and also offers advanced security features such as user management, access control, and activity auditing. 

Harbor Deployment Model

Harbor can be deployed both as a regular workload or as a K8 instance. Deploying as a K8 instance is very handy if you already have a Kubernetes management cluster.… Read More