Kubernetes – DEVOPS DONE RIGHT

Pod Priority, Priority Class, and Preemption

While deploying the deployment manifest, we found that some of the critical pods are not getting scheduled whereas others are getting scheduled easily. Now, I wanted to make sure that the critical pod gets scheduled first over other pods. I started exploring pod scheduling and then came across one of the native solutions for Pod Scheduling using Pod Priority & Priority Class. So in this blog, we’ll talk about Priority Class & Pod Priority and how we can use them for pod scheduling.

Pod Priority

It determines the importance of a pod over another pod. It is most helpful when we need to schedule the critical pods, which are unable to schedule due to resource capacity issues.

Priority Class

It is a non-namespace object. It is used to define the priority. Priority Class objects can have any 32-bit integer value smaller than or equal to 1 billion. The higher the value, the higher will be the priority.

Pod Preemption

It allows the higher-priority pods to evict the lower-priority pods so that higher-priority pods can be scheduled, which is by default enabled when we create PriorityClass.

On-Premise Setup of Kubernetes Cluster using KubeSpray (Offline Mode) – PART 1

Today, most organizations are moving to Managed Services like EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Services), and AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services), for easier handling of the Kubernetes Cluster. With Managed Kubernetes we do not have to take care of our Master Nodes, cloud providers will be responsible for all Master Nodes and Worker Nodes, freeing up our time. We just need to deploy our Microservices over the Worker nodes. You can pay extra to achieve an uptime of 99.95%. Node repair ensures that a cluster remains healthy and reduces the chances of possible downtime. This is good in many cases but it makes it an expensive ordeal as AKS costs $0.10 per cluster per hour. You have to install upgrades for the VPC CNI yourself and also, install Calico CNI. There is no IDE extension for developing EKS code. it also creates a dependency on the particular Cloud Provider.

To skip the dependency on any Cloud Provider we have to create a Vanilla Kubernetes Cluster. This means we have to take care of all the components – all the Master and Worker Nodes of the Cluster by ourselves.

Here we got a scenario in which one of our client’s requirements was to set up a Kubernetes cluster over On-premises Servers, under the condition of no Internet connectivity. So I choose to perform the setup of the Kubernetes Cluster via Kubespray.

Why Kubespray?

Kubespray is a composition of Ansible playbooks, inventory,
provisioning tools, and domain knowledge for generic
OS/Kubernetes clusters configuration management tasks.
Kubespray provides a highly available cluster, composable
(choice of the network plugin for instance), supports most popular Linux distributions, and continuous integration tests.

Deploying Prometheus and Grafana on Kubernetes

Monitoring a Kubernetes Cluster is the need of the hour for any application following a microservices architecture. There are a bunch of solutions that one can implement to monitor their Kubernetes workload and one of them is Prometheus and Grafana. This article will help you to deploy Prometheus and Grafana in your kubernetes cluster with the help of prometheus-operator.

But before setting up these components let’s understand a bit about each of them.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a pull-based open-source monitoring and alerting tool originally built by SoundCloud. It works on a time-series database and scrapes metrics at a given interval from HTTP endpoints. After Kubernetes, Prometheus joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016 as the second hosted project.

Alertmanager

The Alertmanager takes care of alerts sent by alerting tools such as the Prometheus server. It handles grouping, silencing, and routing them to the correct receiver integration such as email, PagerDuty, Slack, etc. It also supports the inhibition of alerts.

Grafana

Grafana is the visual representation of metrics collected by a data source which in our case happens to be Prometheus. We can create or import dashboards for grafana which will make use of promQL to visually represent metrics collected by Prometheus.

What Is the Difference Between CloudOps And DevOps?

Most business managers get confused between CloudOps and DevOps easily. And it is a way too common problem so here we are drawing a line between CloudOps and DevOps that can help the business managers understand the basic difference between CloudOps and DevOps.

As the name proposes, DevOps is a mix of ”Development” and ”Operations”, and depicting it as “specialized deft” appears to be shockingly exact. A bunch of practices and processes assist associations with making a spry, cooperative climate that unites software development, IT tasks, and quality designing to fulfill the basic business operations such as:

Azure HA Kubernetes Monitoring using Prometheus and Thanos

Introduction

Long since Prometheus took on the role of monitoring the systems, it has been the undisputed open-source leader for monitoring and alerting in Kubernetes systems, it has become a go-to solution. While Prometheus does some general instructions for achieving high availability but it has limitations when it comes to data retention, historical data retrieval, and multi-tenancy. This is where Thanos comes into play. In this blog post, we will discuss how to integrate Thanos with Prometheus in Kubernetes environments and why one should choose a particular approach. So let’s get started.