Kubernetes Community Day Amsterdam 2019

Friday sept. 13th the small conference ‘Kubernetes Community Day 2019’ took place in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. Small-scale events like this are a nice counter-balance to the massive scale of CNCF/KubeCon: No flying for miles. Just one track so no need to choose and no missing out on interesting talks.

From what I understood this was one of the goals: Being a smaller, more accessible (both geographically and financially), more environmentally conscious addition to the big conferences. This goal was emphasized by paying attention to the global footprint by offering single-track catering as well: All vegetarian.

Some take-aways:

Ahold

  • Uses a combination of Terraform and Ansible for infra provisioning. Ansible more or less providing the magic & glueing.
  • Uses Rancher to create clusters in different clouds, providing an identical interface for, say, Azure and GKE. (Interesting, as Terraform provides infra-as-code, but not this level of abstraction)

Operators

ABN

  • 3-stage pipeline: Application, Docker image & Cloud delivery

  • Uses Fortify for secure coding scan

  • Policy enforcement:

    • OPA (Kubernetes)
    • Sentinel (Terraform)

Booking.com (ightning)

  • Uses self-developed tool Shipper for rollouts. Multi-cluster, multi-region, multi-cloud.

ArgoCD

  • A GitOps operator.
  • Doesn’t use tiller. Uses helm template.

Azure

  • True hybrid cloud: Azure Stack. Use case: Installing Azure on remote location DCs where bandwith is limited, while at the same time providing a uniform interface with the ‘real’ cloud.

Jfrog

  • Deploys artifact for every branch. Question from public: Just that service? Full stack of related services? Interesting subject.

Useful commands:

# logs for containers that are already gone
kubectl logs -p -c

# CLI cluster management interface
k9s

# debugging helm
helm template
helm install --debug --dry-run
helm get <release>

Keynote/misc.

  • Istio is not going to solve your ‘service mess’
  • ‘Edge’ (What is ‘edge’ anyway?) Kubernetes projects: Kind, K3S
  • Crossplane - Cloud-agnostic service catalogue (‘Give me a HA Postgres DB’, instead of ‘Give me a RDS cluster’)

Environment

Conference Kubernetes Community Amsterdam KCD19