Kubernetes

What’s the point of Operators and CRDs? A seasonal reflection

Posted on December 18, 2023 by Geoff Macartney

It is that time of year when our thoughts naturally turn to pondering the things in life that truly matter. Like Kubernetes Operators, for instance. What’s the point of Operators and CRDs? Searching around for a definition, you find many websites that tell you something along the lines that an operator is a way of extending the API of Kubernetes, or a method of packaging and deploying an application. But so what? Why is this a good thing? How would I explain the value of Operators to someone myself?

Multi-Tenant Ingress for a GKE-based Developer Platform

Posted on December 1, 2023 by Christopher Batey

A key capability of a developer platform is to enable developers to expose services to the Internet as seamlessly as possible. We implement this capability with a developer platform feature called platform ingress. Without this capability, every engineering team is burdened with:

10 + 1 Things I wish I knew about operators before I wrote one

Posted on November 17, 2023 by Christopher O’Quinn

Writing a custom Kubernetes Operator for the first time can be a bit of a challenge. It’s not obvious where to look or where to start!

Upgrading Kubernetes: 8 years of production

Posted on November 8, 2023 by Matt Burgess

How we successfully keep multi-tenanted production clusters up to date. CECG engineers have been running production Kubernetes clusters for one of our clients for over 8 years now. For context, that’s roughly around the time of the Kubernetes-v1.0.0 release and, as of the time of writing, Kubernetes-v1.28.0 is the latest GA version!

Continuous Load: Why and What

Posted on October 23, 2023 by Robert Moss

One of the biggest challenges in running production infrastructures is taking a proactive approach to monitoring network health and being able to find problems before any of the tenants or users.

Exploring Multi-tenancy in Kubernetes: Benefits, Approaches, and Considerations

Posted on September 25, 2023 by Neofytos Zacharia

Multi-tenancy in Kubernetes enables the hosting of multiple tenants or applications within single or multiple clusters while ensuring logical and resource isolation. This capability allows organisations to efficiently manage and deploy various workloads on shared infrastructure, resulting in cost reduction and optimal resource utilisation.

How to monitor an MVP Kubernetes-based Developer Platform with SLOs

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Jingkai He

For this engagement we built an MVP developer platform, based on Kubernetes, in a short timeframe (3 months) with 2 engineers. The goal was to get a small number of initial engineering teams’ application live.

Using kind to test our Kubernetes Cassandra Operator

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Sebastien Bonnet

How would you test a Kubernetes operator? Would you write unit tests for all its features? Would you want to test its behaviour by isolating it from the components it interacts with? This might be tedious and require a fair amount of mocking, but achieving a good test coverage is possible. Would this be enough though? How would you know then that your operator actually works once deployed? How would you know that it is watching the correct resources and making the right API calls?