Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.
Although once Kubernetes is up and running it allows you to operate microservices on your cluster easily and very effectively, launching Kubernetes in the first place can present some very real challenges. For starters, you need to familiarize yourself with Kubernetes concepts, install and configure the Kubectl CLI and set up nodes with sufficient capacity. You need to set up intra-cluster networking, obtain the relevant Kubernetes binaries and images such as etcd and Docker and prepare security certs and credentials. Furthermore, you will need to configure and install the base software on the nodes (Docker, kubelet etc.), bootstrap the cluster and finally start the services.
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Our integration with Chef automation has always been a crucial element of Flexiant Concerto. Concerto templates, which can be deployed and autoscaled on any public cloud, are powered by Chef cookbooks. We have examined in previous blogs just how Concerto makes it simple to make the most out of Chef, e.g. Chef Made Easy, How to simplify the interconnection of Chef roles and Chef Simplified: Helpful Tips for Removing Complexity. Chef had a great year in 2015 – let’s a look at what they’ve achieved over those 12 months.
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We recently looked at how you can use Flexiant Concerto to get going with Kubernetes in three simple steps, bypassing the investment in time and effort that would otherwise be needed when doing this manually. In that post, we took the commonly used guestbook example as our use case.
Today we will look at how to do this for another, very valuable use case, namely Apache Spark, the open source big data processing framework that runs up to 100x faster than Hadoop.
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Back in December we launched the Kubernetes Orchestration as a Service feature in Flexiant Concerto, enabling DevOps to use Kubernetes on any cloud, in minutes letting them get creative without any pain.
In this blog we will look at how you can get going in three simple steps, using the standard Kubernetes guestbook example.
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The Kubernetes project has been growing as an astonishing rate. In well under two years of existence it has already had 15,000+ commits from over 400 contributors. The inaugural KubeCon 2015 had around 500 attendees, nearly twice as many as the first MesosCon and on a par with the first DockerCon back in 2014. What is behind all this interest and activity?
For starters, it is directly descended from Borg, the software system that was so instrumental in powering Google to be the most dominant player on the web. As Cade Metz (wired.com) puts it: “Google’s system provides a central brain for controlling tasks across the company’s data centers. Rather than building a separate cluster of servers for each software system — one for Google Search, one for Gmail, one for Google Maps, etc. — Google can erect a cluster that does several different types of work at the same time.”
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