Kubernetes and Platform Engineering Ramblings
One of the things I have a huge issue with in the industry today, is the insistence on pushing a shift left approach. According to the CNCF glossary, Shift Left is the practice of implementing tests, security, or other development practices early in the software development lifecycle rather than towards the end. While this sounds …
Continue reading "Stop Shifting Left, Shift Down to your platform"
ClusterAPI is becoming the standard approach for deploying Kubernetes clusters no matter which infrastructure provider you want to run on, whether that be a public cloud provider like AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, Akamai etc., a virtualization platform like vSphere, Proxmox, Openstack, etc., or bare metal servers using a management layer like Metal3, Tinkerbell, Canonical MaaS …
Continue reading "Advanced autoscaling of Cluster API based clusters"
Recently a colleague of mine wrote 2 great blog posts (blog-1, blog-2) regarding configuration of TAP to issue certificates signed by ADCS. The solution he documented utilizes Hashicorp Vault as an intermediate CA between cert-manager and ADCS. This approach is a very scalable and simple approach which is very well suited for production setups. The …
Continue reading "Integrating Active Directory CA (ADCS) with TAP"
TDP is an amazing solution built on top of backstage, and the declarative nature in which it is configured and the entities are added is a huge benefit in my mind. With that said, one of the pain points this brings is user management. Users and Groups are entity types in backstage just log components …
Continue reading "Importing Users and Groups in Tanzu Developer Portal (TAP-GUI)"
In TAP 1.6 we got the first glance at the Tanzu Developer Portal (TDP) configurator. While the idea was promising, the functionality was extremely limited, and was closer in my mind to a proof of concept then a true value add. This has now completely changed in TAP 1.7, and we now have an amazing …
Continue reading "Tanzu Developer Portal Configurator – Deep Dive"
TLDR This years VMware Explore in Las Vegas was an amazing conference filled with great content and an overall really good vibe. The announcements that were made during the conference were extremely interesting and it is great to see the deep investment VMware are making in the AI world together with Nvidia with the whole …
Across the Tanzu portfolio as a whole, their has been a major effort for a long time to build a truly cohesive and user friendly experience for operators and developers. Since the early days of TKG, and since the beginning of TAP, the Tanzu CLI has been a key element of how users interact with …
In TAP 1.5, VMware added the integration with Crossplane for dynamic backend service provisioning. With TAP 1.5, we also got a few OOTB Bitnami backed offerings that utilize this Crossplane integration. Now in TAP 1.6, this integration has been expanded to also support MongoDB and Kafka. These 2 new services integrate easily with spring boot …
One of the great features in TAP Developer Portal (previously TAP GUI) since the initial release, has been the app live view plugin, which can help visualize actuator data from spring based java applications as well as steeltoe based dotnet core applications. In TAP 1.6, Application Live View (ALV) has been enhanced with 2 key …
In TAP 1.5, a new installation model was introduced based on a GitOps model, utilizing the Carvel toolset under the hood, to power it all. With TAP 1.6, beyond overall bug fixes, and nice changes to the overall UX of the GitOps Installation method, a really key feature that has been added, is the integration …