I’ve just returned from KubeCon 2019 in Barcelona, and was surprised to see such a keen interest in how Kubernetes consumed infrastructure related resources, especially storage. Although I have been writing about a lot of Kubernetes related items recently, I wanted to put together a primer on some storage concepts that might be useful as a stepping stone or even on-boarding process to some of you who are quite new to Kubernetes. I am going to talk about this from the point of view of vSphere and vSphere storage. Thus I will try to map vSphere storage constructs such as…
Today is the final day of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon here in Barcelona. I missed the morning keynotes as I was meeting with some of our DELL Technologies colleagues based here is Barcelona. They are working on something that is very cool, and I hope I’ll be able to share more with you later this year. Anyway, once at the event, these are some of the sessions I attended. I wanted to try and catch a few presentations that were not storage orientated today, simply to get a better idea of what is happening in the broader K8s community. The first of these…
Day 2 at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 started with another set of keynotes. Bryan Liles started with a theme that Kubernetes is a platform for creating platforms. Kubernetes is not an end in itself, it is not a destination but it is a means of building something for future success. This was a good way to introduce us to some of the customer keynotes that were to follow. Bryan first introduced David Xia from Spotify. David shared with us his story of how Spotify deleted not one, but two of their three Kubernetes clusters during a migration. It was a pretty…
This year, I have once again been fortunate enough to attend KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, which is being held in Barcelona. This is my second such conference, having attended last years European event in Copenhagen. I was very interested in seeing how things have progressed, especially in the cloud native storage space. The morning started with the usual set of keynotes. Dan Kohn and Cheryl Hung filled us in on what is happening in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) space, sharing details about the increase in membership and contributors since the last conference. Of note, there are 7700 attendees…
Last week, the Velero team announced the availability of release candidate (RC) version 1.0.0. I was eager to get my hands on it and try it out. Since it is RC (and not GA), I thought I would just deploy a fresh environment for testing. The guidance from the Velero team is to test it out in your non-critical environments! On a number of Velero github sites, the links to download the binaries do not appear to be working, plus some of the install guidance is a little sparse. Anyhow, after some trial and error, I decided it might be…
As I continue on my cloud native storage journey, I found myself looking at Portworx. The reason for this was down to the fact that Portworx provide a plugin for the Heptio Velero product, and I was interested to see how this behaved on top of my vSphere on-premises infrastructure. I’ve written about Velero a few times already, and done a few posts where I leveraged the Restic plugin for snapshot functionality. Thus, I wanted to see how Portworx achieved the same thing, and wanted to learn about bit more about STORK, Portworx’s Storage Orchestrator for Kubernetes. I’ve written about…
A few weeks back, I took a look at Heptio Velero, formely known as Ark. Velero provides backup and restore capabilities for cloud native applications. During that research, I used a Couchbase DB as my application of choice for backup/restore. After speaking to Couchbase regarding that blog post, they strongly recommended I try the new Couchbase operator rather than the StatefulSet method that I was using for the application. Couchbase talk about the advantages of the operator approach over StatefulSets here. Now, while Couchbase provide steps on how to deploy Couchbase with their operator, they create it in the default…