At Wasm I/O in Barcelona and KubeCon in Paris, several updates regarding WebAssembly (Wasm) were announced. From these, four big patterns emerged. Programming Language Support Is Booming Since its inception, the biggest risk to Wasm’s success has been lack of support from programming languages. Even the best cross-platform bytecode format cannot succeed if no languages compile to that format. I’ve been keeping track of language support in WebAssembly for a long time. In particular, I track how many of the top 20 languages, according to RedMonk, are adopting WebAssembly. Python, JavaScript/Typ ..read more

There’s a real pain so many engineering organizations are feeling right now: On the operational side, engineers are trying to frantically manage the infrastructure, and in the meantime, the application developers who are consuming the infrastructure are increasingly being asked to understand more about the infrastructure and are therefore facing cognitive overload. The end result? Low velocity. The reason for this pain is complexity: first, the emergence of Kubernetes as the de facto operating system for the cloud, which requires in-depth technical knowledge that most developers simply do not ..read more

AMSTERDAM — Improving the developer experience is at the heart of Grafana 11’s release. Among the standout features described during GrafanaCON 2024 here, Grafana Labs’ annual user’s conference, is the Explore Metrics. With it, a major pain point has been removed — you’re now able to form queries and even look at problems in Prometheus specifically without having to write or learn Prometheus query language PromQL. The user can find and select a metric name and immediately see the appropriate visualization, whether your metric is a gauge, counter or histogram, Grafana Labs said. The user ..read more

Meat-and-potatoes talks on just how easy it is to illicitly access cloud native infrastructure engendered some of the more interesting discussions during Rejekts EU 2024, the conference that precedes KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, which featured talks that did not make the KubeCon cut. Due to weak security defenses, distributed networks on Kubernetes, in GitHub repositories and anywhere on the cloud were shown to be vulnerable to an attacker with simple tools, or via ongoing security holes largely left unchecked. It has been a while since I’ve looked at this, but the different tools involve ..read more

Kubernetes offers many advantages, like efficient resource utilization, self-healing, simple scaling and load balancing. But safe, secure and robust access to applications in a cluster is just as important as these features, if not more so. You have a few options for providing clients with access to your services, including ClusterIP (the default), NodePort, LoadBalancer and ingress controllers. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and choosing the right one can be a daunting task. I’ll walk you through setting up a simple application with the ngrok Kubernetes Ingress Controller. You’ll ..read more

Tetrate, a company focused on simplifying Istio and Envoy for enterprise use, has announced the general availability (GA) of Tetrate Enterprise Gateway for Envoy (TEG). This release provides businesses with a modern and secure alternative to traditional Ingress controllers within Kubernetes environments. Years in the making, this commercial version of the Envoy reverse proxy open-source project enables it to be used as a network gateway. This allows it to be used to direct internal microservices traffic and to manage external traffic coming into a Kubernetes cluster. This project is built on ..read more

Resource management can feel like juggling a million tasks at once — especially when you’re trying to keep up with rapid changes in apps and data. You need to be flexible and handle more work when peak periods hit and things get a little out of hand, while you also need a system to keep everything organized. Containerized computing is a great approach to organizing and managing applications. Packing your apps into neat and tidy containers that can run anywhere is a huge step forward, but it can be difficult to choose from the multitude of options on the market. Two of the most lauded contende ..read more

Of all the hoopla around AI, the most misguided part is the insistence on fine-tuned large language models (LLMs). Too many believe specializing a model based on a massive collection of domain-specific data is the only way to build useful AI assistants. This demand for fine-tuning is even more common in highly specialized or technical fields, such as software development and cloud services. A prime example is the ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting of Kubernetes clusters designed to deliver apps. This situation underscores the critical challenge faced by DevOps and app development leaders ..read more

PARIS — Flux is not dying. The future of Flux as a leading open source GitOps platform for Kubernetes may have been in question among some following Weaveworks ending operations. But for those familiar with the project, there has been little concern about Flux’s future life. While Flux did lose Weaveworks-employed Flux contributors, most of them continued their work on the project. It continues to have a significant and active contributor and user base, including support and its use by Aenix, Aviator, Microsoft Azure, GitLab, Teracloud and others that the CNCF listed in a blog post ..read more

PARIS — It is hard to find someone these days who is not struggling with higher prices for cloud services. Similarly, many are struggling with how to try out other cloud providers, by doing pilot runs of different options to see how they work before making a major vendor switch. Others are just getting started and deploying or shifting to cloud native using one of the big three cloud providers — and many don’t even know where or how to begin. A big question mark is how to protect our data, especially how to move it and access it as we want, not just being stuck on one cloud provider who, agai ..read more