Kubernetes for Developers
October is almost here, and for the global open source community that means one thing: It’s Hacktoberfest time! Join the Okteto, Cloud Native and the global open source communities and help change the world, one pull request at a time.
All our open source repos are looking for contributors, so come join us!
When you deploy applications in Okteto, you automatically get endpoints with valid SSL certificates. This way, you can develop and test your applications on a realistic, production-like environment, instead of localhost.
But not every endpoint in our application is meant to be publicly available. There are admin areas, dashboards, or even certain applications that you want to keep to yourself. We’re happy to announce that Okteto Cloud now allows you to restrict access to your applications by marking its endpoints as private 🕵️♀️.
Cloud Native applications are, by definition, highly distributed, elastic, resistent to failure and loosely coupled. That’s easy to say, and even diagram. But how do we validate that our applications will perform as expected under different failure conditions?
Enter Chaos engineering. Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a software system in production in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent and unexpected conditions. Chaos Engineering is a great tool to help us find weaknesses and misconfiguration in our services. It is particularly important for Cloud Native applications, which, due to their distributed and elastic nature, need to be resilient by default.
Litmus is a CNCF sandbox project for practicing Chaos Engineering in Cloud Native environments. Litmus provides a chaos-operator, a large set of chaos experiments in its hub, detailed documentation, quick Demo, and a friendly community. In this blog we’ll show you how you can use Litmus and Okteto together to start Chaos testing your applications in a few seconds.
This year, KubeCon CloudNative Europe is going virtual. Speakers from all over the world have spent the last month or so recording talks on everything Kubernetes and Cloud Native, and starting August 17, the community will gather virtually for 4 days to share and discuss.
This year I’ll be giving a talk titled WebAssembly + OpenFaas, the Universal Runtime for Serverless Functions as part of the Serverless Practitioners Summit Europe 2020 - a KubeCon day zero event. This is a full-day event where the serverless community gets together to talk about best practices, use cases and ideas around Serverless programming in a Cloud Native Context.
One of the big benefits of Okteto Cloud is the ability to deploy Cloud Native Stores with a single click. Via the Okteto Cloud catalog you can deploy things like Redis, PostgreSQL, CockroadDB, RabbitMQ and many more.
These stores are normally meant to support your application, and are typically only accessible to applications and services running on the same namespace. But when managing them, sometimes it’s convenient to be able to use CLI or GUI-based clients running on your own local machine.
In this post, we’ll show you how you can use the port forwarding features of Kubernetes and okteto to securely access your database directly from your local machine, just as if you were developing on your local machine.
Cloud-based development environments are getting a lot of traction due to its great benefits: instant onboarding, access to cloud infrastructure with no friction, and easier team collaboration. I love the idea of clicking a button and have a ready to go development environment in seconds. This is the future of software development.
But cloud-based development environments come with a few of severe limitations:
I’m a huge fan of serverless programming. I just love the simplicity of writing a small piece of code, running a command, and have it available on demand. Last year I spoke at Kubecon’s Serverless Practitioners Summit about my experience around building functions with OpenFaaS, and how you can leverage Okteto to make it even easier (a version of that talk is also available as a guest post in the OpenFaaS’ blog, if you prefer that format).
I had a lot of great conversations after that talk. In one of those, someone asked me if okteto could also work the same way with Kubeless. I wasn’t familiar with Kubeless at the time, but I remember saying that as long as Kubeless “spoke Kubernetes”, it should work. Someone reminded me of that conversation the other day, so I decided to try it out. And, spoiler alert, it does!
In this post, we’ll talk about how to install Kubeless in your cluster, we’ll deploy our first function, and then we’ll use okteto to quickly iterate on a a second version of the function directly in our Kubernetes cluster.
Crossplane, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is an open source Kubernetes add-on that supercharges your Kubernetes clusters enabling you to provision and manage infrastructure, services, and applications from kubectl.
The project recently celebrated their first anniversary, and last month they organized their first ever Community Day 🎉
Kelsey Hightower gave the keynote, and a group of contributors, users and industry leaders talked about the present and future of the crossplane project, the open application model specification, and real-life use cases. All the talks from the event are now available on YouTube. I highly recommend that you check them out.
As part of the event, we gave a talk on How to Add Cloud Services to your Development Environment with Crossplane and Okteto. You can watch the recording here 📺
The code for the demo is available here, if you want to try it out yourself. I’m biased, but this is one of my favorite demos.
Big shout out to Dan and Moka from inviting us, and to the rest of the Crossplane/Upbound team for organizing such a wonderful event.
Ramiro Berrelleza