A first look at Octant – Visualizing your K8s clusters

In my lab, I run a number of different flavors of Kubernetes. Some of them I deploy via kubeadm. Others I have provisioned by VMware PKS. Some of these can access the outside world, while others are secured. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out the relationship between various K8s objects – which services, endpoints,  PVs and PVCs are used by different Pods or StatefulSets. In the past I have used the K8s dashboard, but more often than not, I have to start kube proxy and then run some sort of tunnel (via PuTTY or similar) in order to be…

Fun with PKS, K8s, MongoDB Helm Charts and vSAN

I’ve been spending a bit of time lately look at our Heptio Velero product, and how it works with various cloud native applications. Next application on my list is MongoDB, another NoSQL database. I looked at various deployment mechanisms for MongoDB, and it seems that using Helm Charts is the most popular approach. This led me to the Bitnami MongoDB Stack Chart GitHub Repo. At this point, I did spin my wheels a little trying to get MongoDB stood up. In this post, I’ll talk through some of the gotchas I encountered. Once again, my environment is vSphere 6.7 and…