News

Container Storage Interface (CSI) for Kubernetes GA

The Kubernetes implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) has been promoted to GA in the Kubernetes v1.13 release. Support for CSI was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.9 release, and promoted to beta in the Kubernetes v1.10 release. The GA milestone indicates that Kubernetes users may depend on the feature and its API without fear of backwards incompatible changes in future causing regressions.

Manifold: A Model-Agnostic Visual Debugging Tool for Machine Learning at Uber

APIServer dry-run and kubectl diff

Declarative configuration management, also known as configuration-as-code, is one of the key strengths of Kubernetes. It allows users to commit the desired state of the cluster, and to keep track of the different versions, improve auditing and automation through CI/CD pipelines. The Apply working-group is working on fixing some of the gaps, and is happy to announce that Kubernetes 1.13 promoted server-side dry-run and kubectl diff to beta.

Sidestepping Dependency Ordering with AppSwitch

We are going through an interesting cycle of application decomposition and recomposition. While the microservice paradigm is driving monolithic applications to be broken into separate individual services, the service mesh approach is helping them to be connected back together into well-structured applications. As such, microservices are logically separate but not independent.

Kubernetes Operators—When, how and the gotchas to keep in mind

Netflix Play API: Building an Evolutionary Architecture

At QCon SF, Suudhan Rangarajan presented ‘Netflix Play API: Why We Built an Evolutionary Architecture’. Key takeaways from the talk included: services that have a single identity/responsibility are easier to maintain and upgrade; engineers should spend time identifying core decisions that need to be made when building a service, and determine whether these are ‘Type 1’ or ‘Type 2’ decisions which require thorough deliberation or rapid experimentation, respectively; and designing an ‘evolutionary architecture’, using tools like fitness functions, provides many benefits. Rangarajan, senior software engineer at Netflix, began the presentation by talking about two key business milestones within Netflix in 2016 that also had a large engineering impact.

Fitness function-driven development

Test-driven development, or TDD, involves writing tests first then developing the minimal code needed to pass the tests. TDD is an established practice for feature development that can improve code quality and test coverage. What about other, non-functional requirements such as scalability, reliability, observability, and other architectural “-ilities”?

Open for event based tracing?

In OpenTracing the fundamental concept for representing distributed traces is the (time) span: something that starts and then finishes, can be annotated with key-value pairs and can be “causally” related. This representation gained popularity with Google’s Dapper paper and triggered open-source tracing implementations like Zipkin and Jaeger and eventually the OpenTracing specification, but according to the academic literature it is not the only one. In spite its popularity, the span based trace representation has some shortcomings that limit its applicability.

CVE-2018-18264 Privilege escalation through Kubernetes dashboard

A recently disclosed vulnerability in Kubernetes dashboard (CVE-2018-18264) exposes secrets to unauthenticated users. In this blog post we’ll explore some key takeaways regarding monitoring privilege escalation on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes dashboard is a web based user interface that allows users to manage applications and resources within the cluster.

New AWS services launch with HIPAA, PCI, ISO, and SOC