Cloud Native Weekly: 6 K8s Cost Control Strategies

Open source project recommendation

Base Image Finder

When using container scanning tools to identify Known Vulnerabilities (CVEs, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), it can be difficult to understand where the vulnerabilities are located in the container, and how to mitigate them. Often the easiest and most effective mitigation is to update the "base image" -- or the image used in the FROM statement in the container definition.

BIFs allow you to understand the impact of updating a container's base image:

First, it can detect the base image used by the container, even if it does not have access to the Dockerfile.
Second, it will show you what vulnerabilities exist in that base image.
Finally, it will tell you which versions of the base image do not have the vulnerability.

KServe

KServe provides a Kubernetes custom resource definition for serving machine learning (ML) models on any framework. It aims to address production model serving use cases by providing high-performance, high-abstraction interfaces to common ML frameworks such as Tensorflow, XGBoost, ScikitLearn, PyTorch, and ONNX.

It encapsulates the complexity of autoscaling, networking, health checking, and server configuration, bringing cutting-edge service features like GPU autoscaling, Scale to Zero, and Canary Rollouts to your ML deployments. It provides a simple, pluggable and complete story for production ML services, including prediction, preprocessing, postprocessing and explainability.

Kuberhealthy

Kuberhealthy is a Kubernetes operator for synthetic monitoring and continuous process validation. Write your own tests in any language and Kuberhealthy will run them for you. Automatically create metrics for Prometheus. Includes simple JSON status page.

Clusterpedia

Clusterpedia is a multi-cluster encyclopedia for synchronization, search, and simple control of multi-cluster resources.

Clusterpedia can synchronize resources with multiple clusters, and provides a more powerful search function based on compatibility with Kubernetes OpenAPI, helping you quickly and easily obtain any multi-cluster resources you are looking for effectively.

Article recommendation

6 Kubernetes Cost Control Strategies You Need to Implement in 2023

This post discusses strategies for controlling cloud computing costs when using Kubernetes. It highlights the complexity and dynamics of cloud computing costs and proposes a FinOps approach to managing cloud computing costs. The article lists six Kubernetes cost control strategies, including workload cost allocation, Kubernetes cost optimization, right-sizing recommendations, Kubernetes cost exposure, multi-cluster cost and usage, and cloud billing integration. The article recommends using the Kubernetes governance platform to implement these policies. By adopting these strategies, organizations can better understand how their cloud resources are being used, optimize compute and workloads, and reduce Kubernetes costs.

Top 5 DevOps Trends for 2023

In this article, we explore five DevOps trends organizations should consider as they develop applications in 2023, and how they can be leveraged to get there:

Increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning
The extension of DevSecOps
cloud native technology
DevOps as a Service
Focus more on observability

In 2023, DevOps will undergo another transformation, with new tools and technologies helping organizations stay ahead. For businesses looking to develop applications, staying abreast of the latest trends is crucial to ensuring success in the competitive digital marketplace.

Goodbye etcd, hello PostgreSQL: Running Kubernetes with a SQL database

This post describes a way to replace etcd with PostgreSQL as the data storage backend for Kubernetes. The article first describes the limitations and shortcomings of etcd, and then presents the advantages of using PostgreSQL as a Kubernetes data storage backend. The article details how to use PostgreSQL in a Kubernetes cluster and provides some sample commands and configuration files. The article also discusses some challenges of PostgreSQL in Kubernetes, such as how to manage database backup and recovery, how to handle failover, etc. Finally, the article points out that using PostgreSQL as a data storage backend for Kubernetes requires some additional configuration and management work, but results in better performance and reliability.

Cloud Native Dynamics

Istio becomes a CNCF graduate project

Recently, Istio became a graduate project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). In September 2022, Istio became a CNCF incubation project.

Istio is an open source service mesh that transparently overlays on existing distributed applications. The power of Istio provides a unified and efficient way to secure, connect, and monitor services. Istio is the way to achieve load balancing, service-to-service authentication, and monitoring—with little or no service code changes.

Knative completes fuzzy audit

Knative is pleased to announce the completion of its fuzzy security audit. The audit was conducted by Ada Logics as part of the CNCF's plan to bring fuzz testing into the CNCF field. The audit spanned several months in late 2022 and early 2023, culminating in the writing of 29 fuzzers for 3 Knative subprojects. The fuzzer found an issue in a third-party dependency, which has been fixed.

Instacart creates self-service Apache Flink platform on Kubernetes

Instacart migrated its Apache Flink workload from AWS EMR to Kubernetes to meet the high demand of using Flink for data processing use cases within the organization, as using EMR was an issue for many teams with different needs. As a result, they made the platform easier to use and reduced operational and infrastructure costs.

Since 2021, the company has been using Apache Flink on AWS EMR for multiple use cases ranging from real-time decision making and data augmentation to machine learning feature generation and OLAP data ingestion. Flink usage has grown gradually, with 50 product teams using it and running hundreds of pipelines.

This article is published by OpenWrite, a multi-post platform for blogging !