Cloud Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Kubernetes, KOPS

sre

Kubernetes, Prometheus and Pager Duty: engineering 24/7 ops capabilities for larger teams

Engineering 24/7 ops capabilities for larger teams has its own set of challenges in terms of scalability. Enabling teams to be self-served can work quite well. Especially for organisations with small platform engineering or SRE teams. In this post I'm going to show you an example setup that's suitable for an organisations with similar profile. Read More ›

kubernetes

Containerisation done right: reduce infrastructure TCO and product time to market. Part 2

This is continuation of Containerisation done right: reduce infrastructure TCO and product time to market. Part 1 where we started a journey toward operationally efficient, robust and resilient infrastructure build on containers. In that part I touched on few whys such as “Why microservices?” and “Why containerisation?”. I also went through creating a first container, defining basic supporting infrastructure for building and storing container images, and how to scale up to multiple services at ease. Read More ›

kubernetes

Containerisation done right: reduce infrastructure TCO and product time to market. Part 1

In a modern age of microservices, cloud based IT infrastructure, continuous integration and deployment, importance of containerising infrastructure is of particular importantance. If done correctly from the outset you will save precious DevOps resources. Here is the key thing to make it work for you: consistency and automation. With a consistent and automated method of defining resources, monitoring, alerting, building and testing, adding a new microservice or testing environment becomes a magnitude easier that in the non-containerised world. In a non-containerised world it is necessary to spin-up virtual machines and do lot’s of interaction with cloud providers over their APIs, something that is both complex and time consuming. Let me take you for a journey and explain the steps along the way. It’s a journey from a single service to a complete IT infrastructure up and running. Read More ›

kubernetes

Sharing Kubernetes clusters. Different approaches

Here’s a thing: in some senses Kubernetes abstracts physical infrastructure where services run. Just like with physical infrastructure there may be a clash between different teams or organisational units competing for resources or stepping on each others feet whilst “doing stuff”. Without getting into the details of how such issues were solved in past, let’s discuss how this could be solved in a modern infrastructure setup. As stated in pretty much each of my posts: no one solution fits all, thus you need to adapt it to your needs. Read More ›

infrastructure

Are you production ready? Going live!

Releasing a brand new IT project or introducing a major change to an existing IT system is usually a challenge. Such tasks require careful planning and preparation. Successful release may have a big, positive impact on the organisation. A release which results in unstable, flakey or unavailable system can negatively impact reputation, sales, performance of the organisation and so on. Read More ›