ISSUE 273: New Challenges with Kubernetes

“Some say [Solid] is turning the world of data upside down. I say, isn’t it more flipping it the right way up?”

The Go programming language owes its popularity to a number of factors: speed, robustness and versatility, according to the Golang advocates. In this latest The New Stack Makers podcast, we explore how distributed storage provider Storj uses Go to support its development and operations in its quest to become the “Airbnb of storage.”

Guests for this episode are Storj Chief Technology Officer JT Olio and Storj Software Engineer Natalie Villasana. The New Stack founder and Publisher Alex Williams and TNS News Editor Darryl Taft hosted the conversation.

New Challenges with Kubernetes

A recent survey of 1,200 IT professionals from Canonical found that while 45.6% of respondents report using Kubernetes in production, only 15.7% use Kubernetes exclusively. “I think this clearly shows we've got a long way to go before we've properly modernized the infrastructure,” James Strachan, distinguished engineer at CloudBees, said in the report.

Many organizations have already tested, and approved, Kubernetes for managing their production applications. But according to Canonical, there is still some hesitancy, or latency at any rate, in deploying their entire portfolio to the open source technology. Clearly, some additional work is needed to help K8s, a tool for scaling applications, to scale itself in the enterprise.  

In its latest “Technology Radar” user survey and technology evaluation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation found that there is no single “silver bullet” for managing multiple Kubernetes in production. Even companies that use managed Kubernetes service providers, such as the Google Cloud Platform, still need additional tools, even some homebuilt ones, to help run their Kubernetes clusters, noted CNCF’s Cheryl Hung in a YouTube presentation. While the CNCF work on the Cluster API — an open standard to provide declarative APIs and tooling to simplify provisioning, upgrading, and operating multiple Kubernetes clusters — is promising to alleviate some of the management issues, it is still in its infancy.

This week on The New Stack, we’ve seen some interest around other approaches to managing multiple clusters, including a concept called “virtual clusters.” Virtual clusters are a new approach that allow teams to share clusters without some of the pain involved with Kubernetes multitenancy, write Loft Labs’ Lukas Gentele and Rich Burroughs in a contributed post. “With a virtual cluster, a user is presented with a virtual representation of a cluster with its own control plane. It appears to be working exactly like a full-blown Kubernetes cluster, and its API requests are isolated from other users,” they write. This approach helps secure tenant isolation and establishes a nice separate working environment for developers.  This week Loft Labs’ vcluster became a certified Kubernetes distribution making it “the first virtual cluster solution that passes 100% of Kubernetes conformance tests.” 

As you move Kubernetes into high-scale production environments, what new challenges are you seeing? Let us know at The New Stack. 

Challenging the Myth That Programming Careers End at 40

A long, unexamined truism of the software development world is that coding a dead-end job after people over the age of 35 or so. TNS correspondent David Cassel, however, has found that may not always be the case, showing, in fact, that people who want to code keep doing so deep into their golden years. “The biggest takeaway message may be that nothing can stop a programmer with genuine enthusiasm for their work,” Cassel writes.

GitHub Copilot: A Powerful, Controversial Autocomplete for Developers

A powerful “autocomplete” of sorts, GitHub’s recently launched Copilot could help developers quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on sites like Stack Overflow and across the internet. But the technology has its skeptics too, those worrying about how it borrows code from open source software and the changes it will bring to the software development community.

Buoyant Cloud Beta Brings Simplified Linkerd

Network software provider Buoyant, the company that originally developed the Linkerd service mesh, has launched the public beta of Buoyant Cloud, a SaaS suite of diagnostics, performance management, and on-demand support features for the service mesh.