Jonathan Johnson

Kubernetes for Developers - 3 Day Deep Dive

At the end of this workshop, you will be comfortable with designing, deploying, managing, monitoring and updating a coordinated set of applications running on Kubernetes.

Distributed application architectures are hard. Building containers and designing microservices to work and coordinate together across a network is complex. Given limitations on resources, failing networks, defective software, and fluctuating traffic you need an orchestrator to handle these variants. Kubernetes is designed to handle these complexities, so you do not have to. It's essentially a distributed operating system across your data center. You give Kubernetes containers and it will ensure they remain available.
 
Kubernetes continues to gain momentum and is quickly becoming the preferred way to deploy applications.
 
In this workshop, we’ll grasp the essence of Kubernetes as an application container manager, learning the concepts of deploying, pods, services, ingression, volumes, secrets, and monitoring. We’ll look at how simple containers are quickly started using a declarative syntax. We'll build on this with a coordinated cluster of containers to make an application. Next, we will learn how Helm is used for managing more complex collections of containers. See how your application containers can find and communicate directly or use a message broker for exchanging data. We will play chaos monkey and mess with some vital services and observe how Kubernetes self-heals back to the expected state. Finally, we will observe performance metrics and see how nodes and containers are scaled.
 
Come to this workshop the learn how to deploy and manage your containerized application. On the way, you will see how Kubernetes effectively schedules your application across its resources.

Kubernetes Koncepts

You have some modular code with a REST API. You are on your way to Microservices. Next, you package it in a container image that others can run. Simple. Now what? Your service needs to log information, needs to scale and load balance between its clones. Your service needs environment and metadata way outside its context. What about where the service will run? Who starts it? What monitors its health? What about antifragility? Updates? Networking? Oh my.

Don't get flustered. We will explore how Kubernetes simplifies the complexity of distributed computing.

Kubernetes Koncepts (continued)

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts (1 of 2)

Aha moments with apps in containers can be quite liberating. The mobile space is saturated with “there's an app for that”. For us, we now expect “there's a container for that”. “Write once, run anywhere” (WORA) has changed to “Package once, run anywhere” (PORA). The growing community of containers is riding up the hype curve. We will look at many ways to assemble pods using architecture patterns you already know.

Konsumer Driven Kontracts

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts

At the 2009 Agile conference, J.B.Rainsberger declared “Integration tests are a scam”. I agree. Come see some compelling reasons why consumer-driven contract testing is a much better approach. Particularly for microservices.

We will explore different testing techniques on Kubernetes, including an important one called “Consumer-Driven Contracts”.

Weaving Code Analysis with Your Team

This is the droid you are looking for. Within this droid are hundreds of rules designed to review your code for defects, hotspots and security weaknesses. Consider the resulting analysis as humble feedback from a personal advisor. The rules come from your community of peers, all designed to save your butt.

We will explore techniques on how to add these checks to your IDE, your build scripts and your build pipelines.

Serverless Madness on Kubernetes

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts.

From operating system on bare metal, to virtual machines on hypervisors, to containers orchestration platforms. How we run our code and bundle our applications continues to evolve. Serverless computing continuous our evolutionary path for our architectures.

Meshing Around with Observability

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes or Istio meshing be sure to attend: Understanding Kubernetes: Fundamentals or Understanding Kubernetes: Meshing Around with Istio.

Kubernetes is a complex container management system. Your application running in containers is also a complex system as it embraces the distributed architecture of highly modular and cohesive services. As these containers run, things may not always behave as smoothly as you hope. Embracing the notions of antifragility and designing a system to be resilient despite the realities of resource limitations, network failures, hardware failures and failed software logic. All of this demands a robust monitoring system to open views into the behaviors and health of your applications running in a cluster.

Three important aspects to observe are log streams, tracing, and metrics.

Meshing Around with Service Traffic

Kubernetes out of the box is a strong platform for running and coordinating large collections of services, containers, and applications. As is, Kubernetes is powerful for many solutions.

Remember Underdog? He was a mild-mannered dog, but when stress and conflict were introduced to the plot he took a magic pill, he became a superhero. Istio is a superhero for Kubernetes.

Istio is an open, platform-independent service mesh that manages communications between services in a transparent way. With a distributed architecture many things can fail, slow down and become less secure. Istio provides solutions to those stresses in our plot toward this architecture style:

• Traffic management
• Observability
• Policy enforcement
• Service identity and security

Writing Katacoda scenarios

Explore another learning medium to add to your toolbox: Katacoda.

This is a 90-minute mini-workshop where you learn to be an author on Katacoda. Bring your favorite laptop with just a browser and a text editor.

Have a Github account and bring your laptop. Let's learn together.