How to use, create, and publish Helm charts for non-Kubernetes experts

As Kubernetes continues to eat the container orchestration world, developers are inevitably forced to interact with Kubernetes either for local development or code delivery. Even in organizations with a dedicated platform team or DevOps engineers, developers still need to embrace working with Docker and Kubernetes to a degree to help promote their features and applications to production. For most organizations, this interaction is facilitated via Helm.

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes applications, providing mechanisms to template and group Kubernetes manifests as versioned packages. Since joining the Cloud…

We’re living in the golden age of databases, as money is flowing into the industry at historic rates (e.g. Snowflake, MongoDB, Cockroach Labs, Neo4j). If the debate between relational vs. non-relational or online analytical processing (OLAP) vs. online transaction processing (OLTP) ruled the past decade, a new type of databases has been steadily growing in popularity. According to DB-Engines, an initiative to collect and present information on database management systems, timeseries databases are the fastest growing sector since 2020:

Timeseries databases (TSDB) are databases optimized to ingest, process, and store time-stamped data. Such data may include metrics from servers and…

EKS vs. AKS vs. GKE from a Developer’s Perspective (2021 Edition)

Kubernetes turns seven on June 7th, with the stable release now at v1.21. As Kubernetes began to rule the container orchestration world, use of containers in production also quickly became the norm, with more than 23% of CNCF survey respondents running more than 5,000 containers in their organization, up 109% from 2016. However, managing Kubernetes remains a difficult task, which is growing the demand for managed Kubernetes offerings from the major cloud vendors.

Last year, I published my second managed Kubernetes service comparison piece, detailing the differences between Amazon’s…

Key takeaways from the DevOps Conference Keynote by Cheryl Hung

Back in January, I wrote a recap of the 2020 CNCF Annual Report, summarizing the key updates from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Recently at the DevOps Conference 2021, Cheryl Hung, the VP Ecosystem at CNCF, gave her predictions for cloud native in 2021. Cheryl has a unique perspective from her role at CNCF, overseeing all the activity within CNCF and interfacing with contributors and companies actively building on or looking to migrate to the cloud. …

How to standardize and harden Kubernetes clusters in a centralized manner via Shipa’s frameworks.

As software continues to eat the world, more aspects of software development are experiencing a “X-as-code” movement. Looking at the evolution of DevOps, this was first seen with infrastructure as code or configuration as code. As tools like Terraform and Pulumi mature in the infrastructure space, developers are now applying the same ideas towards managing policies. Policy as code extends the same benefits such as version control, testing, and automation to various types of policies: compliance (e.g. PCI-DSS, SOC-II, GDPR), security (e.g. network isolation, whitelisted registries)…

Ultimate Study Guide to Passing the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) Exam

What is CKS & Why Get Certified?

The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam is the newest addition to the Kubernetes certifications administered by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). CKS focuses on best practices for securing container-based applications and Kubernetes during build, deployment, and runtime. As such, the exam covers topics on securing Linux and Docker environments, as well as popular third party tools (e.g. Trivy, Sysdig, Falco) to monitor and audit events in Kubernetes. As for the exam, it is a two-hour, hands-on exam available for candidates with CKA certifications.

Personally, I was…

Crypto investors saw $1T wiped out of the market in May, as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies nosedived to their lowest in 2021. Given the volatile nature of this asset class, traders looking to navigate the market need fast and reliable price data from multiple exchanges. Earlier this year, I shared a way to analyze cryptocurrency price trends in realtime via Kafka and QuestDB. That project polled the Coinbase API for the latest price and calculated moving averages prior to sending it to a timeseries database for further analysis.

Utilizing Kafka, I was able to leverage its scalability…

Using Infura, Blockchain ETL, and QuestDB to stream Ethereum data to a time-series database.

Previously, I wrote about using Coinbase API and Kafka Connect to track the price of various cryptocurrencies in realtime. While price is an important factor for a potential investor, on-chain data like block information (gas used, difficulty), transactions, and smart contracts also provide useful metrics for technical analysis. In this tutorial, we will pull on-chain data from Ethereum and stream it to QuestDB for further analysis and visualization.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.6+
• Docker
• Infura account

Accessing Ethereum On-Chain Data

Infura is a development platform powered by Consensys with a generous free tier…