The Results are in … The State of K8s 2018 Earlier this year, Kubernetes celebrated its fourth birthday. While it’s still a very young technology, adoption has been rapid. A number of studies have charted this course, but few have dug deeper to understand what’s driving the momentum. That’s why we commissioned a third party to poll almost 400 IT decision-makers across practically every sector. We sought to understand who is moving to Kubernetes, what obstacles they have encountered and how they have benefitted from the technology. The results confirmed some of our suspicions, defied ..read more

Showcasing Heptio’s OSS solutions for multi-cluster ingress at KubeCon NA It’s been an exciting eight months since launching Heptio Gimbal in partnership with Actapio and Yahoo Japan Corporation ahead of KubeCon EU 2018. We created Heptio Contour and Heptio Gimbal as a complementary pair of open source projects to enable organizations to unify and manage internet traffic in hybrid cloud environments. Actapio and Yahoo Japan Corporation were critical early design partners and we were keen to consult with other Heptio customers as well as the larger Kubernetes community on how ingress coul ..read more

I’ve been working with Kubernetes since filing my first commit in October 2016. I’ve had the chance to collaborate with the community on Kops, Kubicorn, and Kubeadm, but there’s one gap that has been nagging me for years: how to to create the right abstraction for bringing up a Kubernetes cluster and managing it once it’s online. As it turned out, I wasn’t alone. So begins the story of Cluster API. In 2017 I spent an afternoon enjoying lunch at the Google office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood meeting with Robert Bailey and Weston Hutchins. We had connected via open source and shared a ..read more

Announcing Heptio Ark v0.10, with greater support for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments By: Carlisia, Nolan Brubaker, Wayne Witzell III, Jennifer Rondeau, Steve Kriss, Andy Goldstein, and Ross Kukulinski We’re excited to announce the release of Heptio Ark v0.10! This release includes features that give you greater flexibility in migrating applications and organizing cluster backups, along with some usability improvements. Most critically, Ark v0.10 introduces the ability to specify multiple volume snapshot locations, so that if you’re using more than one provider for volume storage within a c ..read more

The AWS cloud provider for Kubernetes enables a couple of key integration points for Kubernetes running on AWS; namely, dynamic provisioning of Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and dynamic provisioning/configuration of Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) for exposing Kubernetes Service objects. Unfortunately, the documentation surrounding how to set up the AWS cloud provider with Kubernetes is woefully inadequate. This article is an attempt to help address that shortcoming. More details are provided below, but at a high-level here’s what you’ll need to make the AWS cloud provider in Kubernetes wo ..read more

Today we are incredibly excited to announce that Heptio will be acquired by VMware. It is a watershed day for our company, and we hope for the industry as a whole. The inevitable question is … why have we decided to join forces (now)? Life at Heptio has been pretty exceptional since we founded the company two years ago. In a short period, we have made strong contributions in the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem, assembled a remarkable team and onboarded some of the most prestigious enterprises as customers. We were incredibly well capitalized and supported by our investors. So ..read more

Heptio Contour is an open source Kubernetes ingress controller that uses Envoy, Lyft’s open source edge and service proxy, to provide a modern way to direct internet traffic into a cluster. Last Friday, we released Contour version 0.7, which includes some helpful new features that you should know about if you’re evaluating options for incoming load balancing in Kubernetes. Contour 0.7 enables: Better traffic control within a cluster: With support for the ‘ingress.class’ annotation, you’ll now be able to specify where incoming traffic should go within a cluster. One key use case here is t ..read more

A week in the life of a Field Engineer It’s no secret that technology workers with Kubernetes skills are in high demand. Large companies like Box, Capital One, and Comcast are transforming how they build and deploy production services with Kubernetes. Most Heptio customers engage with our Field Engineering team to research new patterns and technology, learn best practices, solve problems, and optimize Kubernetes for their needs. While no two days or weeks are exactly alike, I’d like to offer a glimpse into what could be a typical week in the life of a Field Engineer working onsite with a ..read more

This is the third post in a series highlighting some of the exciting new features released in Heptio Contour version 0.6. If you missed out on those, start with Introducing Heptio Contour 0.6 and Improving the multi-team Kubernetes ingress experience with Heptio Contour 0.6. One of the improvements that we added to IngressRoute is the ability to route traffic to multiple Services for a given path as well as apply weights to those upstream Services. This seemingly small addition allows users to implement some simple, yet very powerful deployment patterns. Canary Deployments One way to roll ..read more

Kubernetes has a variety of primitives that make it a great platform for running workloads submitted by multiple teams. Features like Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Namespaces make it possible to divide clusters across multiple teams in a safe way. There are some challenges however, and one of the most important ones our enterprise customers have encountered lies in the Ingress API. In this post, we will explore how a bad Ingress resource can break your ingress layer, and walk through our novel approach to multi-team ingress using Heptio Contour’s new IngressRoute resource. Multi-team I ..read more