At EngineerBetter we’ve evaluated four self-hosted CI systems in order to compare them against each other: Jenkins, Concourse, Tekton and Argo Workflows. For each CI system we’ve created some pipelines that ..read more

At EngineerBetter, we’re going through the formality of ensuring that we’ve got the Certified Kubernetes Administrator qualification box ticked. Kelsey Hightower’s Kubernetes The Hard Way is a valuable guide to setting up a Kubes cluster ‘by hand’, and so I set about running through it ..read more

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced that External Secrets Operator (ESO), an open-source solution for synchronising secrets from external APIs into Kubernetes, can begin incubating as an early stage project in the CNCF Sandbox ..read more

When managing Kubernetes clusters, cluster administrators need to ensure the overall stability of the system. To accomplish this it is necessary to avoid disruptions to the control plane, and also avoid any risks of users being able to escalate their privileges thus causing further problems. With this in mind, protecting the kube-system namespace and enforcing pod security policies to run payloads with just the necessary access is a must ..read more

The term Kubernetes monitoring mixins appears in many Kubernetes related projects involving Prometheus and Grafana. Despite its broad usage, the details about it cannot be easily found. There are many cases where mixins are used without notably mentioning them (for example in prometheus-operator). In this article, we are going to explore what it is and also how you can use it in your Kubernetes cluster ..read more

Prometheus is a simple and effective open-source monitoring system. In the years after we published the article Monitoring Microservices with Prometheus, the system has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and became the preferred monitoring tool for distributed systems. One of the reasons for this, as mentioned in our previous article, is its intuitive simplicity. It doesn’t try to do anything fancy. It provides a data store, data scrapers, an alerting mechanism and a very simple user interface ..read more

I recently came across a fun and interesting challenge. In the latest project I joined, a team wanted to do a "lift & shift to the cloud". As a Cloud Native engineer I've seen this pattern fairly often, although it never means quite the same thing ..read more

Managing secrets in Kubernetes can be a cumbersome job. In a multi-service multi-environment setup, you can end up with hundreds of secrets without even noticing. It is hard to keep track of everything and at the same time manage secret rotation, onboard new services, and onboard new people with correct access permissions ..read more

We built a .NET Operator SDK, in C#, so you can build your own Kubernetes Operators in C# or any .NET language. There's of course the Go Operator SDK, and there's our Java Operator SDK, so why not having something for the .NET community ..read more

Java (and its other JDK-based siblings) is the most widely used programming language in large companies. Java developers are backend focused and used to building complex distributed systems. Yet these developers’ potential is rarely used when it comes to programmable infrastructure challenges.  ..read more