The Kubernetes project continues to evolve rapidly. Features like Container Runtime Interface (CRI) v2 and Service Mesh Interface (SMI) are being actively developed, promising further refinements in container management and service communication. CRI v2: The Container Runtime Interface (CRI) defines the communication protocol between Kubernetes and the underlying container runtime engine (like Docker or containerd). CRI v2 introduces several improvements, including better sandboxing capabilities, enhanced security context enforcement, and support for container resource management. Service Mes ..read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn't just a buzzword anymore; it's rapidly changing the way we build, deploy, and manage software. The DevOps landscape, with its focus on speed and automation, is a particularly fertile ground for AI innovation.  Let's dive into how AI is set to reshape DevOps and cloud infrastructure. AI-Powered Automation Intelligent CI/CD Pipelines: AI models can be integrated into your continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. These models analyze code patterns, predict potential vulnerabilities, recommend optimizations, and automate testing cycles. Tool ..read more

The world of infrastructure as code (IaC) witnessed a significant shift in August 2023 when HashiCorp, the company behind the popular Terraform tool, announced a license change. Terraform, previously open-source under the MPLv2 license, transitioned to the Business Source License (BSL) v1.1. This change restricted how companies could commercially use Terraform, particularly when competing with HashiCorp's own products. This decision sent shockwaves through the developer community. Many users, concerned about the implications of the new license, rallied for an alternative. The response was swif ..read more

Kubernetes has made a significant architectural change: the removal of Dockershim with the release of v1.24. This means Kubernetes now relies exclusively on containerd as its container runtime interface (CRI). Let's explore why this change happened, the implications for Kubernetes users, and what it means specifically for AWS EKS. Why containerd? CRI Alignment: Containerd was designed specifically to align with the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) specification created for Kubernetes. This ensures seamless integration and reduces unnecessary complexity. Simplicity and Stability: Co ..read more

As I'm moving on to a new role soon, I'm leaving behind my capable engineers in my department. This post is all about my reflections for the past years with regards to managing a team. Treat everyone like family I treated every single member in my department like family. Everyone in the department is a valuable asset to me. Making the environment at ease for everyone have it's benefits such as: Allowing every single member to voice out their thoughts freely without fear Motivates every single member to enjoy working in the team Motivates every single member to help out one another Opinions m ..read more

I believe that most cloud and devops engineers will come across at some point in their career to manage public cloud for China. It must be confusing to hear Aliyun being mentioned when you thought it should be Alibaba Cloud. Today, I shall dive in a little to demystify the differences between both. Essentially, they're the same thing but serve different markets: Alibaba Cloud: This is the broader, internationally-facing brand of Alibaba's cloud computing services. It's geared towards businesses and individuals outside of mainland China. It's accessed through alibabacloud.com. Aliyun:  Th ..read more

If you have a very large EKS cluster with tons of pods running on it, you might have encounter DNS resolver errors while querying the AWS VPC DNS resolver. We will talk about the this issue today and how to setup your cluster to mitigate this issue. Before we dive into the topic, let us look at AWS documentation on VPC DNS Resolver limits (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-dns.html#vpc-dns-limits). Each EC2 instance can send 1024 packets per second per network interface to Route 53 Resolver (specifically the .2 address, such as 10.0.0.2 and 169.254.169.253). This quota canno ..read more

Creating an EKS cluster in AWS is an easy task with Terraform. We will start off with looking for the respective module in Terraform registry (https://registry.terraform.io/modules/terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws/18.26.3).  We will be using version 18.26.3 in this article. Terraform Registry - AWS EKS ModuleQuick Start We can always refer to the GitHub repo for examples (https://github.com/terraform-aws-modules/terraform-aws-eks/tree/master/examples) to quick start our deployment. Terraform AWS EKS Module GithubManual Definition We can also create our own EKS definition using the documentat ..read more

AWS Karpenter (https://github.com/aws/karpenter) Recently I came across this project called Karpenter (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-karpenter-an-open-source-high-performance-kubernetes-cluster-autoscaler/) and it intrigued me greatly. Diving into Documentations Based on it's official documentations (https://aws.github.io/aws-eks-best-practices/karpenter/), it describe Karpenter as an open-source cluster autoscaler that automatically provisiones new nodes in response to unschedulable pods by evaluating the aggregate resource requirements on the pending pods and chooses the optim ..read more

I'm sure every DevOps engineer will touch on Jenkins at least once in their professional career. Today, we will talk about how to scale your Jenkins with Kubernetes. This setup will make your Jenkins master as the orchestrator and configuration storage, it does not build any jobs on the master. As such, you can scale your master instance small in this case. Pre-requisites First, you have to setup a Jenkins master instance. I will not be going in-depth on this. For me, I prefer to run my Jenkins master on an EC2 instance as I prefer to run stateful applications outside of Kubernetes. Once that ..read more