Starting Cloud Native Journey with Kubernetes and its Ecosystem

We, at Egen, have been using Kubernetes in production for almost a year now. Over the last 12months, we have experimented with different k8s configurations, tools, and integrations ranging from running local cluster with Minikube or Docker (>18.01-ce) to installing the k8s cluster on AWS with kops and integrating it with IAM using aws-iam-authenticator.

By sticking to the principle of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), we have become pretty good at creating a new highly-available k8s clusters on AWS in less than 15 minutes with all necessary components and hardened access security that includes Ingress Controllers (with private and public load-balancers), Cert Manager, Metrics Server, Monitoring, Alerting, centralized Logging, and Disaster Recovery using Heptio Ark.

Every piece of our engineering ecosystem runs on k8s clusters now.

Our current set of k8s clusters host:

• Data engineering frameworks like Confluent Kafka, Kafka Connect, KSQL, Schema Registry, and REST Proxy servers.
• Atlassian suite: Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, and Service Desk.
• Fully automated build & deploy (CI/CD) pipelines with git, Jenkins, and Nexus (for npm, maven, and docker registries). Our Jenkins setup securely integrates with multiple k8s clusters to deploys a variety of apps.
  WordPress based public sites.
• multiple environments including dev, staging, and production with automated service DNS resolutions with <app-name>.<env-prefix>.<cluster-dns>.
• Let’s Encrypt based automated SSL cert provisioning and renewal using Cert Manager. (Pretty much ready to get rid of the last remaining GoDaddy SSL cert).
• pretty much everything else that powers our KERNEL platform.

In the Q4 of 2018, we started putting all these learnings of running Cloud Native production workload with Kubernetes in the public domain. We launched a weekly webinar series titled: Collective Talks | Cloud Native Series.

Here’s the ordered list of all these recordings from the Collective Talks of this series:

• Deep Dive into Kubernetes Architecture and Components
• Setup a High-Available Kubernetes Cluster on AWS using kops
• Harden Kubernetes Access Security with RBAC and AWS IAM
• Deploy Stateless Workload on Kubernetes with Pods, Deployments, Daemonsets, and Services

And, if you are unsure of how to go about this, or what the process consists of, we offer a comprehensive assessment of your current infrastructure and provide a path to becoming a Cloud Native DevOps practice. Contact us to start the assessment.