pipetail Blog

What’s the most annoying thing about Helm workflows? There’s literally no visibility during the deployment process. Do you have some migration (Helm) hook that’s failing? Helm will tell you that one of the hooks failed but all the kubectling is up to. And that’s just fine, Helm is too complex even without some live tailing of the deployment process. The current state This article did not come out from the blue.

There are no doubts that Helm is extremely popular tool, perhaps the most popular tool in the whole Kubernetes ecosystem. But are there any ways how to streamline deployments of complex applications?

We had the chance to see quite a bit of clusters in our years of experience with kubernetes (both managed and unmanaged - on GCP, AWS and Azure), and we see some mistakes being repeated. No shame in that, we’ve done most of these too!

I’ll try to show the ones we see very often and talk a bit about how to fix them.

We’ve spent most of the last month on implementing EKS. Surprisingly, we’re always solving the same concerns no matter what project we’re working on. Here’s couple of tips for your EKS clusters! Skip kube2iam, go directly with IAM Roles for Service Accounts Kube2iam is amazing tool. I really like it and it helped me with granular control access in couple of projects. However, there’s a better solution that is supported out of the box: IAM roles for services accounts.

As you might already know, security is not something that a specialized department should be responsible for. Instead, we all should bear in mind that security matters and build secure solutions from the very beginning. Today we’re gonna talk about some practices in the world of containerized apps and Kubernetess. So let’s say we have some best practices for the containerized workloads. But how to enforce that? We’ll tell you right away.

GitLab-CI/CD is a great and powerful product for CI/CD pipelines. Hosted gitlab.com solution offers shared runners and some usage minutes based on your paid plan (even if the free tier). Though you might want to run your own runner in your private or public cloud. I will show how to run GitLab runner on AWS using terraform, Elastic Kubernetes Service and GitLab kubernetes integration.

There are customers where public internet access is no go. But at the same time you need to access your EC2 instances, right? How would you approach this? Usually, we use bastion hosts, that’s basically a different name for jump host you can use to access internal resources. In AWS, you don’t need to manage such extra instances and take care of all the low-level configuration. Instead, you can leverage fully managed Session Manager from the AWS Systems Manager suite!

Are you using EKS managed worker pools? If you don’t have any specific reasons for not using them, you should. It saves tons of time plus it boosts the “managed Kubernetes” feeling. However, this pretty new offering did not cover one specific use case: cluster with no Internet access.

At the moment, there are no doubts that transformation to the new architectural pattern, microservices architecture, is happening. Today, I don’t want to emphasize that microservices architecture does not solve everything. This transformation is happening and my role here is to show you some possible ways how to minimize the struggle.