Author: Marco Antonio Carcano
NetApp is certainly one of the most popular storage brands, with quite a big portfolio of cost-effective storage solutions. With the spreading of Kubernetes, they developed Trident, their own Container Storage Interface (CSI) compatible storage orchestrator.
In the "NetApp Astra Trident Tutorial NFS Kubernetes CSI HowTo" we see how easy it is to deploy and set it up.
Kubernetes is certainly the most popular and probably the best solution for orchestrating containerized workloads, but maintaining its vanilla distribution is certainly a challenge, so you must carefully guess pros and cons in terms of maintenance costs and operational risks.
A very cost effective and interesting alternative to running the vanilla Kubernetes is the "Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2" (RKE2), a certified Kubernetes distribution focused on security to adhere to the U.S. government’s compliance requirement. RKE2, besides providing a reliable Kubernetes distribution, smoothly integrates with Rancher.
In the "RKE2 Tutorial - RKE2 Howto On Oracle Linux 9" post we see it in action, installing a highly available multi-master Kubernetes cluster, exposing the default ingress controller using MetalLB for providing Load Balancing services.
Rancher is a complete software stack for managing multiple Kubernetes clusters either on a public cloud or on premises. With the first stable release issued in 2016, it has slowly improved its feature set and become more and more popular. Currently it is probably the best option for managing Kubernetes clusters.
In the "Rancher Tutorial - Rancher Howto Install On Oracle Linux 9" post we see it in action learning how to to quickly deploy and install it on a Oracle Linux 9 platform, so to be able to immediately start playing with it and learning how this amazing tool can really simplify your life when dealing with Kubernetes.
One of the HAProxy strengths is not being very strict about its configuration structure, enabling it to create configurations suitable for fitting very messy scenarios. Sadly this is also its biggest maintainability pitfall: especially if you want to automate its configuration using automation tools and templates, it is up to you to define the best possible standard configuration structure fitting your needs.
The "HAProxy Tutorial - A Clean And Tidy Configuration Structure" post is an insight providing guidelines on how to structure the HAProxy configuration in an effective way, promoting the sharing of floating IP addresses and using easy to edit maps for load balancing the traffic forwarding it to the correct destination. In addition to that, it also provides a way for splitting the statistics so to have them displayed only for the scope of each specific balanced service instead of as a whole.
HAProxy is certainly one of the most blazoned, fast and efficient (in terms of processor and memory usage) open source load balancer and proxy, enabling both TCP and HTTP-based applications to spread requests across multiple servers. In the "High Available HA Proxy Tutorial With Keepalived" we see not only how to install it in a High Available fashion, but also how to set the configuration in a clean and tidy way, having it automatically fetched from a Git remote repository.
Interacting with Git using Python is a very common use case in the DevOps field: very often it is necessary to checkout application’s or scripts along with their configuration or even just checkout versioned configurations. Although more rare, it is sometimes necessary to update the checked out contents and push the committed version back to the “origin” remote repository. In the "Git With Python HowTo GitPython Tutorial And PyGit2 Tutorial" post we play with the two most commonly used Python libraries used to interconnect to Git: gitpython and pygit2.