Some of the best Cloud Native engineers in the world work for Container Solutions (yes, we’re biased, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true).
Besides helping client companies like Shell, Adidas, and FiduciaGAD (the largest IT services provider for banks in Germany) with their Cloud Native transformations, our engineers are actively moving the technology forward by creating and contributing to open-source projects, and by organising and participating in community events to extend and amplify skills and knowledge.
Another way they help move the field forward is by sharing on our blog the things they have learned on the job, writing about their own mistakes, discoveries, and new best practices.
As we close out the final days of 2019, we’d like to share some of the most impactful technology-related blog posts from the past 12 months.
Trow and GitOps
The foundational elements of Cloud Native architecture are by now well established, but the tools and techniques around them continue to evolve rapidly. Sometimes we have to invent things to fit our needs.
One example to come out of the Container Solutions’ open-source crucible in 2019 was Trow—Adrian Mouat’s open-source container registry and image management solution for Kubernetes. Trow enables you to quickstart the process of installing a K8s registry by running a registry right inside the cluster itself!
Cloud Native transformation is somewhat of a moving target for any organisation, given the plethora of possible platforms and tools that are available. (Case in point: take a peak at the current Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape and its 1,296 options, as of this writing!) As a sector we are constantly evolving new ways of working with them.
One of the most-read blogs of 2019 was by Container Solutions team lead Ádám Sándor, about the emerging practice of GitOps and how to apply GitOps in an enterprise context. Or, as Kelsey Hightower describes this approach for implementing Continuous Deployment in Cloud Native applications, ‘GitOps: versioned CI/CD on top of declarative infrastructure. Stop scripting and start shipping’.
Such rapid iteration of methods and approaches makes case studies particularly helpful: understanding what worked for a particular context, and more importantly why it worked, is definitely news we can all use. Adam followed up his introduction to GitOps with a case study explaining the design decisions his team made to help FiduciaGAD evolve to embrace Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery practices, and analyses the outcome of those decisions. (Hint: GitOps is involved.)
A Cloud Native Anti-Pattern
Finally, sometimes the most helpful information involves what not to do. Container Solutions CTO Pini Reznik took a look at a very common, and almost always problematic transformation tactic: a company simply trying to ‘lift and shift’ its entire existing operations onto the cloud in the name of going Cloud Native. (Hint: it doesn’t work).
In 2019, we wrote an entire book about what works—and doesn't—in a move to the cloud. 'Cloud Native Transformation: Practical Patterns for Innovation', was published this month by O'Reilly. You can get a free, 75-page excerpt here.
There are many, many more helpful and informative blog posts from Container Solutions engineers in 2019, and we encourage you to finish the year strong by scrolling through the offerings. Also check out our top blog posts from 2019 about the human factor in Cloud Native.
Thanks for reading with us this year. We look forward to sharing much more with you in 2020!
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