Kubernetes ConfigMaps are a convenient way to encapsulate configuration values into a named resource and then access those values in your application as environment variables. Creating these resources, however, is typically a manual process, requiring either manually writing YAML or ingesting directories or files containing the values. Today, the most recent version of Environr’s CLI added support for a new output format: kubernetes-configmap. Invoking the CLI tool with the kubernetes-configmap outputter generates a Kubernetes ConfigMap with the same name as the Environr configuration set.
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As a DevOps architect you hold the responsibility of keeping your tooling as simple as possible for your own benefit as well as others. Simple architectures hold less technical debt, require less cognitive load to understand, and have less moving parts to break. Kubernetes Kubernetes is a powerful open-source container orchestration platform that’s gained a lot of popularity over the past few years and for any non-trivial software projects, it’s a solid investment.
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Managing secrets in Kubernetes is currently somewhat of a challenge. Kubernetes users have the Secret resource which works well to define secrets in the cluster, but where should secrets reside before they’re added to the cluster? One all-too-common pattern is to encrypt secrets and store them in a git repository for versioning and long-term storage. While this works, and one can argue that a git respository is nothing more than versioned abstract storage, the problem with this approach is not with git itself (or any other DVCS) but with the general use-case of DVCS’.
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This is Part 4 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 Conclusion If you’d read up until this point, it’s probably no surprise what I’m going to write here. Kubernetes is an open source project that can run on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Mesos, Azure, SoftLayer, CenturyLink Cloud, your local machine (minikube), CoreOS, and bare metal. It’s design is based on concepts from running containers at Google for 15 years.
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This is Part 3 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 Kubernetes As a Google sponsored system, running Kubernetes on anything but Google Container Engine always seemed somewhat like a mismatch to me. AWS seemed to have too many nuances with how their load balancers, VPCs, and security groups worked when compared to Google Container Engine, that running Kubernetes on top of a different IaaS would be risky and error-prone.
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This is Part 2 of Elastic Beanstalk vs. ECS vs. Kubernetes, see Part 1 ECS (Elastic Container Service) ECS is Amazon’s answer to container orchestration. It’s a bit rough around the edges and definitely a leap from Elastic Beanstalk, but it does have the advantage of significantly more flexibility including the ability to even define a custom scheduler. All of the limitations imposed by Elastic Beanstalk are lifted. But, so is the simplified interface and the ease of deploying applications onto the cluster.
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This isn’t going to be a super-technical review of these 3 platforms, but more of a high-level overview of what to expect when engaging with each. If you’re coming here with little knowledge of containerization or running container-based workloads, here’s a short gist. Tools like Docker and rkt provide a way to run programs in containers, isolated from the rest of a system leveraging Linux control groups. Running applications this way leads to better composability, organization, and helps build immutable infrastructure that’s more robust and easier to manage.
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