ANZ Pied Piper

In this post I covered the basics of providing persistent storage to Kubernetes pods using the CSI driver for XtremIO. Organizations are increasingly looking at running stateful applications in Kubernetes, and the CSI driver is quickly gaining maturity, so this topic is becoming more and more relevant. In this video I have recorded a quick demo that shows CSI in action and demonstrates the basic premise that the lifecycle of the PV (Persistence Volume) is independent from that of the pods it attaches to. For instructions that you can use don't forget to visit the original article .

The purpose of this post is to provide an introduction to “Kubernetes CSI” with examples you can use to build your own projects. Before we start, if you need to build your own Kubernetes cluster to follow along this write up you can follow these instructions . The files for this blog post including the “simplog” Python code are in the “CSI” folder of this GitHub repository https://github.com/cermegno/kubernetes-csi Prior to CSI, Kubernetes provided in-tree (ie as part of the core code) plugins to support volumes but that posed a problem in that storage vendors had to align to the Kubernetes release process to fix a bug or to release new features amongst other problems. CSI (Container Storage Interface) is a standard for exposing arbitrary block and file storage systems to containerized workloads on Container Orchestration Systems (COs) like Kubernetes. Using CSI, third-party storage providers such as DellEMC can write and deploy plugins exposing new storage systems in Kubernete...

Lately I have been working with Kubernetes during the preparation of a new course. In the past, when I needed a Kubernetes cluster I used one of the cloud providers. GCP is specially good for Kubernetes but my trial account run out. Besides, this course requires me to do some things with VMware, so I had to create my own environment a few times in the lab on top of vSphere. During this time, I couldn’t find any other references that worked for me 100% so I decided to write this article with the few tricks that I have learnt A word of caution, during this process you will be doing things like lowering the security of your virtual machines so that the cluster installs more easily. So please do use this procedure only for development environments and at your own risk To understand what you are doing it helps to be a little bit familiar with the Kubernetes architecture. You are going to need one Virtual Machine for every not you want in your cluster. There are two types of nodes: M...

Now it is a good time to develop an interest in container technology. Nowadays when we think about containers, Docker comes right to mind. Containers is not a new technology. It has been available in Linux in various shapes and forms for a number of years. The real merit of Docker is how super easy it made to package and distribute software along with its dependencies and hence its popularity. However many people started to wonder if it could be taken one step further. I like to compare Docker with VMware Workstation. It is great to create and run multiple virtual machines in my laptop but if I want those VMs to run a mission critical workload relying on a single server is not a great idea. For production I would like to see the capability to withstand hardware failures or at least to recover from them quickly. And that's why VMware has products like ESX and vCentre. We need the similar capabilities in the container world, in other words we need to manage the orchestrati...