The Ambassador Labs team and I have settled safely back into our daily routines after another excellent (virtual) KubeCon NA event last week. There were so many great sessions, and we all thoroughly enjoyed the hallway track and Slack channels discussions

Although no travel was involved this year there was still a lot of logistics to figure out, and so a massive tip of the hat to the entire CNCF KubeCon + CloudNativeCon team!

Here are our top five takeaways from the event:

• Platforms as product: Self-service is essential
• Safety (and speed): Move fast and don’t break things
• DevSecOps: Security…

I love creating live demonstrations of the latest thing I’ve been working on for KubeCon, but let’s be honest, creating *good* tech demos is not easy! I wanted to share a couple of learnings from the past few years, which may help those of you (and future me…) that are still struggling to finalize your demo.

Start with the Story

It doesn’t matter how technical the demo will be — whether it’s dev-focused or ops-focusing, using the command line or a GUI, or showing a pet project or commercial product — you need a story in order to capture the watcher’s attention and draw…

If you have ever worked on a greenfield web-based application you will have experienced the pain of testing your application with TLS enabled. It’s easy to spin up an app or microservice and access this via an IP address or localhost, but this isn’t a fully qualified domain name and doesn’t quite behave in the same way. And if you’re containerizing your app and deploying to something like Kubernetes, then you’ll potentially want to configure your API gateway to terminate TLS before proxying requests through.

So what are your options?

Self-Signed Certificates

There are many instructions to be found online for using…

It’s easy enough to spin up a local skeleton Kubernetes environment using tools like minikube, microk8s, or k3s, but getting an application-ready Kubernetes cluster that can route user-generated (or test) traffic to observable backend services is more challenging. In order to be productive, engineers need to move from working with a simple skeleton cluster to a “dancing skeleton”, application-ready Kubernetes environment. The K8s Initializer can help you do just this!

Production-like Networking Challenges

In order to illustrate some of the challenges with bootstrapping a cluster for development, let’s run through a couple of common scenarios. If you are moving from a local development…

The first batch of the Ambassador Labs Livin’ on Edge podcasts has seen four superb guests sharing their wisdom and experiences on creating cloud platforms and building effective developer experiences. Here are our top four takeaways from the conversations:

• The cloud developer experience can be “complicated”
• A cloud platform must be managed as a product
• The old “staging environment” model needs updating
• Don’t underestimate the value of continuous delivery

The remainder of this article explores each of these takeaways in more detail.

You can find the Soundcloud links to the recent episodes below, and you can also subscribe on other…

Kubernetes has been widely adopted as a container manager, and has been running in production across a variety of organisations for several years. As such, it provides a solid foundation on which to support the other three capabilities of a cloud native platform: progressive delivery, edge management, and observability. These capabilities can be provided, respectively, with the following technologies: continuous delivery pipelines, an edge stack, and an observability stack.

Practically every cloud vendor or private cloud solution supports the deployment and operation of the Kubernetes container orchestration framework. Since the initial release of Kubernetes by Google in 2014, a large…

Kubernetes has been widely adopted as a container manager, and has been running in production across a variety of organisations for several years. As such, it provides a solid foundation on which to support the other three capabilities of a cloud native platform: progressive delivery, edge management, and observability. These capabilities can be provided, respectively, with the following technologies: continuous delivery pipelines, an edge stack, and an observability stack.

Practically every cloud vendor or private cloud solution supports the deployment and operation of the Kubernetes container orchestration framework. Since the initial release of Kubernetes by Google in 2014, a large…

Cloud computing and container orchestration frameworks provide an excellent foundation for deploying and running modern software applications. However, in order for these technologies to support the move towards “full cycle development” — where developers take increased ownership from idea to delivery — there are several requirements that must be met for both the development and platform/SRE personas. Many teams design and build a platform in order to support these requirements, often using Kubernetes as a foundation. This platform must focus on offering self-service functionality, and it must support four core capabilities: container management, progressive delivery, edge management, and observability.

In…