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11 posts tagged with "DevOps"

A set of practices that combines software development and IT operations.

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CAPI, Sveltos, Cyclops: Automated Dev Environments

· 11 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

Are you ready to simplify how your Platform team spins up and down development environments while improving DevX? In this post, we show how Cluster API(CAPI), Sveltos, and Cyclops work together. They automatically create Kubernetes environments. This setup lets developers easily interact with and manage their applications. It is not magic, it is the power of Sveltos combined with the right tooling!

title image reading "Sveltos, CAPI, Cyclops Examaple"

Sveltos: Optimise Day-2 Ops, Cilium & Tetragon

· 9 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

How easy is it to handle Day-2 operations with existing CI/CD tooling? Sveltos provides the ability to perform not only Day-1 operations but also helps platform administrators, tenant administrators and other operators with Day-2 operations. For example, we can use the HealthCheck and the ClusterHealthCheck features to not only watch the health of a cluster but also collect information from the managed clusters and display them in the management cluster.

In today's blog post, we will cover a way of deploying Cilium as our CNI alongside Cilium Tetragon for observability. We will then continue with a simple TracingPolicy deployment to capture socket connections and then use Sveltos to display the tracing results back to the management cluster.

The goal of the demonstration is to showcase how Sveltos can be used for different Kubernetes cluster operations based on the use case at hand.

title image reading "Sveltos Health Check"

Sveltos Tiers: Day-2 Ops Targeted Updates

· 9 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

In previous posts, we outlined how Sveltos allows Platform and tenant administrators to streamline Kubernetes applications and add-on deployments to a fleet of clusters. In today's blog post, we will take a step further and demonstrate how easy it is to target and update a subset of resources targeted by multiple configurations. By multiple configurations, we refer to the Sveltos ClusterProfile or Profile Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs). The demonstration focuses on day-2 operations as we provide a way to update and/or remove resources without affecting production operations.

This functionality is called tiers. Sveltos tiers provide a solution for managing the deployment priority when resources are targeted by multiple configurations. They fit into current ClusterProfile/Profile definitions. They also set the deployment order and easily override behaviour.

Today, we will cover the case of updating the Cilium CNI in a subnet of clusters with the label set to tier:zone2 without affecting the monitoring capabilities defined in the same ClusterProfile/Profile.

title image reading "Sveltos Tiers"

OpenTofu: RKE2 Cluster with Cilium on Azure

· 12 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

In a previous post, we covered how to create an RKE2 cluster on Azure Cloud using the cloud-free credits from the Rancher UI. As this is a convenient approach to get started with Rancher, in today's post, we will demonstrate how to use OpenTofu to automate the deployment.

OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform. It is an open-source project, community-driven, and managed by the Linux Foundation. If you want to get familiar with what OpenTofu is and how to get started, check out the link here.

We will also show how easy it is to customise the Cilium configuration. Plus, we will enable kube-vip for LoadBalancer services using HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language).

title image reading "OpenTofu Rancher RKE2 Cluster on Azure"

Sveltos Templating: Cilium Cluster Mesh

· 9 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

Have you ever wondered how to dynamically instantiate Kubernetes resources before deploying them to a cluster? What if I tell you there is an easy way to do it? Sveltos lets you define add-ons and applications using templates. Before deploying any resource down the managed clusters, Sveltos instantiates the templates using information gathered from the management cluster.

In a previous post, we outlined a step-by-step approach to forming a Cilium cluster mesh between two clusters. In today's post, we will demonstrate how the Sveltos templating is used to deploy a Cilium cluster mesh dynamically in one go.

title image reading "Sveltos Templating Cilium"

Rancher RKE2 Cluster on Azure

· 10 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

For the last couple of days, I have been working on a new use case installing RKE2 clusters powered with Cilium by Azure Cloud. The requirement at hand was to use a Rancher instance and from there start deploying RKE2 clusters. I found that the official Rancher documentation has outdated instructions for pre-configuring Azure Cloud.

In today's blog post, we will outline the steps to set up Azure cloud-free credits for deploying RKE2 clusters with Cilium. Additionally, we will cover any limitations that come with the free credit concept.

title image reading "Rancher RKE2 Cluster on Azure"

Cilium Cluster Mesh on RKE2

· 11 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

Working with on-prem RKE2 clusters, I noticed many issues in forming a Cilium cluster mesh between clusters in an automated way.

In this post, I will walk through a step-by-step process to get a Cilium cluster mesh up and running. We will cover the problems I ran into along the way. The goal is to follow a GitOps-friendly approach, with no need for the Cilium CLI. We will use Helm and kubectl for the setup.

Cilium on EKS with Sveltos

· 10 min read
Eleni Grosdouli
DevOps Consulting Engineer at Cisco Solutions GmbH

Introduction

In today's blog post, we will demonstrate an easy way of deploying and controlling Cilium on an EKS cluster with Sveltos.

Most documentation shows step-by-step installation using Helm chart commands. So, we chose to show a different way: the GitOps approach. We will use the Sveltos ClusterProfile CRD (Custom Resource Definition) for this.

title image reading "Cilium on EKS with Sveltos Diagram"