KubeFM

Service meshes and the community's opinion of them have changed drastically over the years.

From being perceived as unnecessary, complicated and bloated, they matured into security and observability powerhouses (while still retaining much of their complexity).

In this KubeFM episode, William deep dives into the world of service meshes and explains a few of the technical choices and trade-offs of service meshes in simple terms.

You will learn:

• What is a service mesh and its design (i.e. control plane and data plane).

• How Ambient mesh departs from the traditional sidecar model and how it affects reliability and security.

• Why there's more than just eBPF in sidecarless service meshes and the limitation of this technology.

• The direct costs (compute) and human factors involved in operating a service mesh.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/TkXCvsLC1

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Can you run databases on Kubernetes and survive to tell the story?

Or should you refrain from running stateful workloads as much as possible?

In this KubeFM episode, Steven argues that you should run databases on Kubernetes.

He also goes further and demonstrates how to build your custom operator to manage your database.

Listen to the episode and learn how:

• You can use Kubebuilder and the Operator Framework to build your operator.

• Custom Resources lets you create higher abstractions to manage your infrastructure as code.

• Steven's operator manages hundreds of databases at scale at QuestDB.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/-k6hrcpV-

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Structured Authentication Config is the most significant Kubernetes authentication system update in the last six years.

In this KubeFM episode, Maksim explains how this is going to affect you:

1. You can use multiple authentication providers simultaneously (e.g., Okta, Keycloak, GitLab) — no need for Dex.

2. You can change the configuration dynamically without restarting the API server.

3. You can use any JWT-compliant token for authentication.

4. You can use CEL (Common Expression Language) to determine whether the token's claims match the user's attributes in Kubernetes (username, group).

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/lDCTZPPr2

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Is sharing a cluster with multiple tenants worth it?

Should you share or have a single dedicated cluster per team?

In this KubeFM episode, Artem revisits his journey into Kubernetes multi-tenancy and discusses how the landscapes (and opinions) on multi-tenancy have changed over the years.

Here's what you will learn:

• The trade-offs of multi-tenancy and the tooling necessary to make it happen (e.g. vCluster, Argo CD, Kamaji, etc.).

• The challenges of providing isolated monitoring and logging for tenants.

• How to design and architect a platform on Kubernetes to optimise your developer's experience.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/zp0L7-xM4

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

How hard could it be to debug a network issue where pod connections time out?

It could take weeks if you are (un)fortunate like Alex.

But Alex and his team didn't despair and found strength in adversity while learning several Kubernetes networking and kubespray lessons.

In this KubeFM episode, you'll follow their journey and learn:

• How a simple connection refused led to debugging the kernel syscalls.

• How MetalLB works and uses Dynamic Admission webhooks.

• How Calico works and assigns a range of IP addresses to pods (and what you should watch out for).

• How to use tcpdump and strace to debug network traffic.

And as a bonus, Alex shared his knowledge of onboarding engineers and how to perfect the process.

Spoiler alert: this episode goes into a great level of (networking) detail, but the solution turned out to be very simple.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/P5Y-NrSW5

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Pod Topology Spread Constraints is a convenient feature to control how pods are spread across your cluster among failure domains such as regions, zones, nodes, etc.

You can also choose the pod distribution (skew), what happens when the constraint is unfulfillable (schedule anyway vs don't) and the interaction with pod affinity and taints.

It's a great and straightforward feature, so what could possibly go wrong?

In this episode of KubeFM, you will follow Martin and his team's journey in discovering and fixing a production incident (on a Friday afternoon) due to a misconfiguration.

You will also learn:

• What are Pod Topology Spread Constraints, and how to use them?

• How unfulfillable scheduling requirements could lead to un-schedulable pods.

• How to detect and alert on unscheduled pods.

• How to manage your team during an incident to keep them calm and focused.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/pCFzfGtHS

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

On average, Kubernetes nodes running on ARM instances are 20% cheaper than their AMD counterpart.

Optimising your cloud bill is tempting, but how do you seamlessly migrate existing workloads to a different architecture?

And how do you do it at scale, with more than 4000 engineers and 30 clusters in 4 regions?

In this episode of KubeFM, Thibault and Miguel explain how Adevinta built an internal platform on Kubernetes for mixed AMD and ARM workloads.

You will learn:

• The challenges they faced with validating containers for mixed architecture with a mutating webhook and the open source solution they came up with: noe.

• Building an internal platform requires careful planning and designing simple interfaces that are backwards compatible.

• How to not DDoS your container registries.

• How to onboard users to an internal platform and evangelise it.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/_k-Y1jgFS

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

The best way to learn something is to break it or to build it yourself.

And that's precisely what Luca did to understand how Linux containers (and Docker) work: he built his own, Barco.

In this episode of KubeFM, you will learn:

• Why Linux containers "don't exist" but are the product of several Linux features you can put together and configure properly to get what we know as containers.

• How Kernel features such as cgroups and namespaces isolate a process.

• How you can use seccomp and capabilities to secure the container.

• How to make the right syscall from C to build your own container engine.

Also, Luca explained how he learned how to build Barco from scratch, detailing the (struggle) to find reputable sources and (lack of) respected books.

Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by LearnKube — become an expert in Kubernetes

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/5W1r90mvP

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

What if Kubernetes was so easy to install and manage to be foolproof?

In this KubeFM, Mat argues that GKE is the only Kubernetes managed service that offers a beginner-friendly and thought-through experience in running a Kubernetes cluster.

Follow Mat's journey to AKS, GKE and EKS and learn:

• How GKE autopilot can help you optimize costs and reduce underutilized node resources.

• How the GKE container-optimized OS prevents and eliminates an entire set of security misconfigurations in node management.

• How GCP's application of machine learning on the IAM permissions can help you gradually refine security permissions as applications are deployed.

But Mat didn't stop there and had more food for thought:

• Are we over-logging and over-monitoring in Kubernetes?

• CNI and Ingress have evolved since their inception. What happens now that we are stuck with those decision choices?

• Is there a simpler alternative to Kubernetes that is multi-cloud and cloud agnostic, and what could it look like?

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/G6tPB0114

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.

Network Policy usage is inverted.

It's easier to list the services that you want to connect to, but Network Policy forces you to list all clients that can connect to your pod.

How would you even know that another team plans to connect your apps?

But if Network Policy is not the right tool, then what should you use?

In this KubeFM podcast, you will explore:

• How Network Policies are not as bad as you might think, but they are low-level APIs that are not always practical to use directly.

• Intent-based Access Control (IBAC) as a higher-level abstraction to describe your network segmentation requirements.

• How you can use IBAC to generate Network Policies, Istio Authorization Policies, AWS IAM & Roles, and more.

More info

• Find all the links and info for this episode here: https://ku.bz/Xhd2xKDH7

• Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more.