Kubernetes

OpenShift gives its administrators the ability to manage a set of security context constraints (SCCs) for limiting and securing their cluster. Security context constraints allow administrators to control permissions for pods using the CLI. SCCs allow an administrator to control the following: Running of privileged containers. Capabilities a container can request to be added. Use of host directories as volumes. The SELinux context of the container. The user ID. The use of host namespaces and networking. Allocating an 'FSGroup' that...

Welcome to the eighth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. In Part 7 we learned how...

Welcome to the seventh installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. In Part 6 of our adventure...

For any of you planning to attend Devoxx Belgium during the week of 7 November, Red Hatters will be delivering 13 sessions, labs and BoFs and so you'll definitely want to attend one or more of them when you're there. Here's the list in chronological order. Enjoy! (By the way - if you're, I'll be there too so please stop by the Red Hat booth to say "hello".) Monday : Managing Cloud Native Applications with Kubernetes - End-to-End - University...

Welcome to the sixth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. You’ll need the docker service and the oc utility to follow along in this post; for instructions check out Part 5: Upping Our (Cloud) Game. We’ve been on a pretty amazing...

Developers have a lot of choices when deciding how to start using OpenShift and Kubernetes locally --- without going through a native OS installation. We all need to have a development environment as close as possible to production (to prevent defects caused by environmental differences), but ideally we need to do this without spending a lot of time to setup and a lot of computational resources (cpu, memory and disk space). This post will present four alternatives to create a...

Welcome to the fifth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. The previous posts of this series have focused on how to package ZNC in a way that exposes run-time configurability into the immutable world of containers. But forget about ZNC -...

In the microservices landscape, the API provides an essential form of communication between components. To allow secure communication between microservices components, as well as third-party applications, it's important to be able to consume API keys and other sensitive data in a manner that doesn't place the data at risk. Secret objects are specifically designed to hold sensitive information, and OpenShift makes exposing this information to the applications that need it easy. In this post, I'll demonstrate securely consuming API keys...

Welcome to the fourth installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a Connection. In Part 3, we looked at how to customize the configuration of ZNC using an expect script and environment variables. But forget ZNC, because we’re really talking about That App You...

Inspired by a great blog post by Jakub Scholz on "Scalable AMQP infrastructure using Kubernetes and Apache Qpid", I wanted to write a post about the ongoing effort to build Messaging-as-a-Service at Red Hat. Messaging components such as the Apache Qpid Dispatch Router, ActiveMQ Artemis and Qpidd scales well individually, but scaling a large deployment can become unwieldy. As Scholtz demonstrates, there are a lot of manual setup when creating such a cluster using kubernetes directly. The EnMasse project was...

Red Hat Developers and author N. Harrison Ripps have just released the first pieces of a ten-part series ("That app you love") in which Harrison describes the process of deploying an application using containers into a clustered environment on the cloud. Using the ZRC IRC client as a sample application, Harrison demonstrates each step in the process of containerizing software, dealing with issues like statelessness, security, and robustness that are typically architectural hurdles for most development teams moving to a...

Welcome to the second installment of That App You Love, a blog series in which I show you how to you can make almost any app into a first-class cloud citizen. If you want to start from the beginning, jump back and check out Part 1: Making a connection. In our last post, we met my ZNC container, good ol’ znc-cluster-app - but don’t fret about ZNC because we’re really talking about That App You Love - whatever it happens...

I am going to show you how I took an everyday, off-the-shelf application and turned it into a cluster-ready juggernaut of persistent usefulness. Along the way, I’ll share the pitfalls that I hit in getting this all working so that you can chuckle at my misfortune and avoid having to make the same mistakes yourself. This series will run every Tuesday and Thursday until we've accomplished our goals, so stay tuned in, subscribe, and thanks for reading! Meet “That App...

Fuse Integration Services (FIS) is a great product bringing routing (Apache Camel), SOAP and Rest services (CXF) and messaging (JMS) to the modern age of containers and PaaS and all its goodies: encapsulation, immutability, scalability and self healing. OpenShift provides the PaaS infrastructure to FIS. A developer may implement a module in isolation on his own machine, but it often makes sense, especially when we talk about integration services, to have the code being validated in a complex integrated environment...

Microservices are becoming a new trend, thanks to the modularity and granularity they provide on top of advantages like releasing applications in a continuous manner. There are various platforms and projects that are rising which aims to make writing and managing microservices easy. Keeping that in mind, I thought, why not make a demo application that can give an example of how microservices are built and how they interact. In this article, I will be building a small application using...

The last 4-5 years have seen the debut of many new software products specifically targeting both infrastructure services and IT automation. The consumerization of IT has caused its architects to take a fresh look at their existing, often times monolithic apps and IT infrastructure and asking: Can we do better? How do I keep IT relevant? How do I keep track of all these VMs and data? How do I scale out my IT environment without a huge budget increase...

Prior to working at Red Hat, I worked for a software company, building financial software for large institutions. From my experiences I knew that some customers required, or demanded, a very aggressive Service Level Agreement (SLA). If we consider an SLA of 99.999% (generally referred to as “five nines”) then this would allow for a six-second unavailability or downtime over a full week, anything more and penalties would have to be paid. To provide this level of uptime, it is...

In an earlier article, Debugging Java Applications using the Red Hat Container Development Kit, it was discussed how developer productivity could be improved through the use of remotely debugging containerized Java applications running in OpenShift and the Red Hat Container Development Kit. Not only does remote debugging provide real time insight into the operation and performance of an application, but reduces the cycle time a developer may face as they are working through a solution. Included in the discussion were...

Ansible serves as a great tool for those system administrators who are trying to automate the task of system administration. From automating the task of configuration management to provisioning and managing containers for application deployments, Ansible makes it easy. In this article, we will see how we can use Ansible to provision Vagrant boxes. So, what exactly is a Vagrant box? In simple terms, we can think of a vagrant box as a virtual machine prepackaged with the development tools...

The charter of Open Innovation Labs is to help our customers accelerate application development and realize the latest advancements in software delivery, by providing skills, mentoring, and tools. Some of the challenges I frequently hear from customers are those around Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment provisioning and configuration. This article is first in the series of articles that guide you through installation configuration and usage of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This...

Situation: You’re a great software developer and a fearless leader. Your CEO bursts into your cubicle and he is giving you vast amounts of investment capital, no data center, and limited staff. Your task: build a multi-region, highly available presence in AWS (or your favorite cloud provider) that can be maintained by minimal man-power. Your multi-tier Java EE app is almost ready. You are going to be required to create, maintain, and monitor a large amount of servers, RDS instances...

You’ve heard of microservices. You’ve heard of OpenShift. You’ve heard of Kubernetes. Actually, you may already have considerable experience with each of these three concepts and tools. But do you know how to combine all of them in order to deploy microservices effectively? If not, this article is for you. Below, I’ll explain how microservices, OpenShift and Kubernetes fit together, and provide an overview of how you can leverage the orchestration tools provided by OpenShift and Kubernetes in order to...

Microservices are standing at the " Peak of Inflated Expectations". It's immeasurable the number of developers and companies that want to bring in this new development paradigm and don't know what challenges they will face. Of course, the challenges and the reality of an Enterprise company that has been producing software for the last 10 or 20 years is totally different from the start-up company that just released its first software some months ago. Before adopting microservices as an architectural...

One of the common requirements for Java based applications on OpenShift is to have these workloads connect back out to an enterprise database that resides outside of the OpenShift infrastructure. While OpenShift natively supports a variety of relational databases (including Postgres and MySQL) as Docker based deployments within the platform, connecting to an existing enterprise database infrastructure is preferred in many large organizations for a variety of reasons including: Inherent confidence in traditional databases due to in house experience around...