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Bootstrapping a Cluster API Management Cluster

Cluster API is, if you’re not already familiar, an effort to bring declarative Kubernetes-style APIs to Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management. (I encourage you to check out my introduction to Cluster API post if you’re new to Cluster API.) Given that it is using Kubernetes-style APIs to manage Kubernetes clusters, there must be a management cluster with the Cluster API components installed. But how does one establish that management cluster? This is a question I’ve seen pop up several times in the Kubernetes Slack community. In this post, I’ll walk you through one way of bootstrapping a Cluster API management cluster.

The process I’ll describe in this post is also described in the upstream Cluster API documentation (see the “Bootstrap & Pivot” section of this page).

At a high level, the process looks like this:

1. Create a temporary bootstrap cluster.
2. Make the bootstrap cluster into a temporary management cluster.
3. Use the temporary management cluster to establish a workload cluster (through Cluster API).
4. Convert the workload cluster into a permanent management cluster.
5. Remove the temporary bootstrap cluster.

The following sections describe each of these steps in a bit more detail.

Create a Temporary Bootstrap Cluster

The first step is Continue reading

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Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes peers into cloud visibility with sponsor ThousandEyes. The company is improving its platform with multi-service views, Internet and hybrid cloud visibility, SD-WAN monitoring, and more. The goal is to give you a more comprehensive picture of the dependencies that make up today's applications, services, and networks. Our guests are Angelique Medina and Archana Kesavan.

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Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes peers into cloud visibility with sponsor ThousandEyes. The company is improving its platform with multi-service views, Internet and hybrid cloud visibility, SD-WAN monitoring, and more. The goal is to give you a more comprehensive picture of the dependencies that make up today's applications, services, and networks. Our guests are Angelique Medina and Archana Kesavan.

The post Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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What to know about Azure Arc’s hybrid-cloud server management

Azure Arc for servers, a centralized management tool that provides visibility into Azure data services, Kubernetes clusters, and servers running Windows or Linux, has been generally available since September, helping fulfill Microsoft’s stated intent to support enterprise hybrid-cloud architectures.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You

Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.

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Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You

Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.

The post Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Remembering Francis Kariuki: Africa’s Tweeting Chief

The African community networks community is sad to learn about the passing of one of its prolific members, Chief Francis Kariuki of Lanet-Umoja, a rural community in Nakuru County, Kenya. He died on on 21 October 2020 after a short illness.

Chief Kariuki was a renowned Kenyan administrator who pioneered the use of technology to foster development, justice, trust, peace, and inclusion in his community. His struggle for digital inclusion earned him several nicknames, including “The Digital Champion” and “The Tweeting Chief,” for being the first African local administrator to use social media channels to promote community development. His passion and drive for adopting technologies in service delivery at the local level earned him national and global recognition.

Chief Kariuki was a strong advocate for community networks in Africa. He successfully championed for a community network in Lanet-Umoja and worked with his community members to coordinate its installation, operation, and management.

Beyond Kenya, Chief Kariuki engaged in the Africa Summits on Community Networks, a platform where community network operators in Africa gather to foster learning, networking, knowledge, and experience sharing. At the Summits, Chief Kariuki shared key insights on community networks and inspired many young people to adopt digital Continue reading

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KubeCon+CloudNativeCon: Service Mesh Battle Stories and Fixes

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. “There’s a lot to say about each of these service meshes and how they work: their architecture, why they’re made, what they’re focused on, what they do when they came about and why some of them aren’t here anymore and why we’re still seeing new ones,” Layer5, explained during his talk with “Service Mesh Specifications and Why They Matter in Your Deployment.” Service mesh is increasingly seen as a requirement to manage microservices in Kubernetes environments, offering a central control plane to manage microservices access, testing, metrics and other functionalities. One-third of the respondents in The New Stack survey of our readers said their organizations already use service mesh. Among the numerous service mesh options available; Envoy, Linkerd and

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Schneider Electric plans U.S. expansion, announces new micro data centers

Schneider Electric is better known in its native Europe than in the U.S., but it's looking to change that with a $40 million project to upgrade its U.S. manufacturing resources. The company, which specializes in energy management and automation technologies for data centers, shared its plans for U.S. expansion at its Innovation Summit North America 2020, held virtually this year.Schneider also unveiled a new set of ruggedized data-center enclosures targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Designed for indoor industrial environments, the EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series offers a fast and simple way to deploy and manage edge computing infrastructure in a place like a factory floor.To read this article in full, please click here

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Next Pathway launches an automated cloud migration tool

Next Pathway has announced the next-generation of its cloud-migration-planning technology, called Crawler360, which helps enterprises shift legacy data warehouses and data lakes to the cloud by telling them exactly how to cost, size, and start the journey.Data warehouses and especially data lakes can get out of control with poorly managed, siloed data and different forms of structured and unstructured data turning the warehouse and lake into a swamp.Crawler360 addresses this problem by scanning data pipelines, database applications, and business-intelligence tools to automatically capture the end-to-end data lineage of the legacy environment. By doing so, Crawler360 defines relationships across siloed applications to understand their interdependencies, identifies redundant data sets that have swelled over time that can be consolidated, and pinpoints “hot and cold spots” to define which workloads to prioritize for migration.To read this article in full, please click here

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Schneider Electric plans U.S. expansion, announces new micro data centers

Schneider Electric is better known in its native Europe than in the U.S., but it's looking to change that with a $40 million project to upgrade its U.S. manufacturing resources. The company, which specializes in energy management and automation technologies for data centers, shared its plans for U.S. expansion at its Innovation Summit North America 2020, held virtually this year.Schneider also unveiled a new set of ruggedized data-center enclosures targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Designed for indoor industrial environments, the EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series offers a fast and simple way to deploy and manage edge computing infrastructure in a place like a factory floor.To read this article in full, please click here

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Chasing CRC Errors in a Data Center Fabric

One of my readers encountered an interesting problem when upgrading a data center fabric to 100 Gbps leaf-to-spine links:

• They installed new fiber cables and SFPs;
• Everything looked great… until someone started complaining about application performance problems.
• Nothing else has changed, so the culprit must have been the network upgrade.
• A closer look at monitoring data revealed CRC errors on every leaf switch. Obviously something was badly wrong with the whole batch of SFPs.

Fortunately my reader took a closer look at the data before they requested a wholesale replacement… and spotted an interesting pattern:

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Chasing CRC Errors in a Data Center Fabric

One of my readers encountered an interesting problem when upgrading a data center fabric to 100 Gbps leaf-to-spine links:

• They installed new fiber cables and SFPs;
• Everything looked great… until someone started complaining about application performance problems.
• Nothing else has changed, so the culprit must have been the network upgrade.
• A closer look at monitoring data revealed CRC errors on every leaf switch. Obviously something was badly wrong with the whole batch of SFPs.

Fortunately my reader took a closer look at the data before they requested a wholesale replacement… and spotted an interesting pattern:

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Anatomy of a Build-to-Suit Data Center

Enterprises seeking alternatives to one-size-fits-all data center solutions are increasingly considering building their own facilities for more flexibility and greater control over costs.

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Salesforce scoops up team chat pioneer Slack for $27.7B

Slack’s popular business chat app will be integrated with Salesforce’s cloud tools, serving as the front end for its Customer 360 portfolio.

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Some Site Updates

For the last three years, the site has been largely unchanged with regard to the structure and overall function even while I continue to work to provide quality technical content. However, time was beginning to take its toll, and some “under the hood” work was needed. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent some time updating the site, and there are a few changes I wanted to mention.

1. The site has been updated to use a much more recent version of Hugo. This change is largely invisible to readers, but a couple of the site changes are related to this upgrade. Specifically…
2. Although the main RSS feed for the site (found here) remains a full content feed, I ran into issues getting Hugo to use my custom RSS templates for generating the category and tag feeds (for example, the RSS feed for the “Tutorial” category, or the RSS feed for the “Kubernetes” tag). You’ll now find that the category and tag feeds are summary feeds only as opposed to full content feeds. I do intend to restore them to full content feeds as soon as possible.
3. Finally, I’ve updated the “metadata line” when viewing a single article Continue reading

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The Docker Developer Guide to AWS re:Invent

This is the busiest time of the year for developers targeting AWS. Just over a week ago we announced the GA of Docker Compose for AWS, and this week we’re getting ready to virtually attend AWS re:Invent. re:Invent is the annual gathering of the entire AWS community and ecosystem to learn what’s new, get the latest tips and tricks, and connect with peers from around the world. Instead of the traditional week-long gathering of 60,000 attendees in Las Vegas, the event has pivoted to a flexible three-week online conference. This year the event is free, and anyone can participate on their own schedule. This blog post covers highlights of the event so Docker developers can get the most from re:Invent.

In the kickoff keynote by CEO Andy Jassy, AWS announced a number of new features for container developers, including a new capability, ECS Anywhere, which allows Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to run on-prem and in the cloud to support hybrid computing workloads as well as the launch of AWS Proton, an end-to-end pipeline to deliver containerized and microservices applications. Separately, AWS also announced a new public Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and gallery today. We’re excited to see a Continue reading

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Tigera to Support Amazon EKS-Distro

Today, we are excited to announce our commitment to support Calico and Calico Enterprise for the Amazon EKS-Distro, a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS. EKS-D enables you to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters using the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS.
We view EKS-D as further confirmation of the central role that Kubernetes plays in today’s IT infrastructure. We are excited to work with Amazon on this initiative to enable EKS-D users with the same robust enterprise networking and network security functionality that you rely on today to secure your EKS cluster deployments.

Tigera’s commitment to supporting EKS-D highlights our fundamental design principle of “choice”. Our customers can choose to use Calico and Calico Enterprise with their preferred Kubernetes distribution and use the same solution to operate seamlessly across different Kubernetes distributions, including multi-cloud multi-cluster and hybrid environments. Calico Enterprise, for example, allows you to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters to define, apply, and enforce consistent networking and security policy across all your clusters from a single master cluster. Adding EKS-D clusters, which use the same underlying versions of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, as an option for our customers Continue reading

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Remotely Triggered Black Hole Filtering as Service

Remotely triggered black hole (RTBH) filtering is a technique that provides the ability to drop undesirable traffic before it enters a protected network. It is commonly used for the mitigation of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) and DoS attacks. We have covered a configuration of source and destination RTBH for Cisco IOS-XR in a previous tutorial. A trigger […]
Continue reading...

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Data Center Master Classes

I’m doing a series of three master classes through Juniper on various DC fabric topics—

Join Juniper’s Russ White, a widely published 30-year network engineering veteran, in a three-part masterclass exploring the data center. Choose from classes on data center fabric, physical topologies, or data center security.

You can register here.

From the schedule—

• Class 1: Data Center Fabric, December 2, 12 PM EST
• Class 2: Physical Topologies, January 13, 12 PM EST
• Class 3: Security in the Data Center, February 10, 12 PM EST