Techtober
This October saw a myriad of tech events. Apple announced their new MacBook Pro featuring their M1 Pro and M1 Max hardware. There was also Google NEXT 21, KubeCon North America and AWS Innovate to name a few - it's been a busy month.
Google NEXT 21
Distributed Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, and Multi Cloud were hot topics. Having the ability to run workloads across clouds, including those on-premises, with a common view and a service oriented architecture is the niche Google's Anthos is pitched to fill.
"Anthos is a modern application management platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for cloud and on-premises environments."
Anthos provides you with a supported managed Kubernetes platform and includes Anthos Service Mesh which is based on Istio. For those who are interested in a micro services architecture but still have legacy applications, Anthos makes migrating these applications to more than one provider a predictable process.
AWS Managed Grafana GA
AWS's Managed Grafana has been upgraded to version 8 and offers new data sources, visualizations, and features, including:
library panels that you can build once and re-use on multiple dashboards
a Prometheus metrics browser to quickly find and query metrics
and, new state timeline and status history visualizations
To centralize the querying of additional data sources within an Amazon Managed Grafana workspace, you can now query data using the JSON data source plugin. You can now also query Redis, SAP HANA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Atlassian Jira, and many more data sources.
You can use Grafana API keys to publish your own dashboards or give programmatic access to your Grafana workspace. Enable single sign-on to your Amazon Managed Grafana workspaces using Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0).
Calls from the Amazon Managed Grafana console and code calls to Amazon Managed Grafana API operations are captured by AWS CloudTrail so you can have a record of actions taken by a user, role, or AWS service. Additionally, you can now audit mutating changes that occur in your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace, such as when a dashboard is deleted or data source permissions are changed.
KubeCon North America
Deploy Federated Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Clusters with Terraform and save your tears. HashiCorp was one of the many at KubeCon educating us. Managing infrastructure with IaC has its challenges especially when it spans providers.
Being a cloud-agnostic infrastructure provisioning tool, you can use Terraform's collection of providers to provision and compose resources from multiple cloud providers using the same infrastructure-as-code workflow allowing you to create multi-cloud architectures without needing to manage cloud-specific implementations and tools.
So, you could get your EKS, AKS, GKS and DOKS clusters all set up with a single IaC workflow and not need to perform any manual provider-specific tasks that introduce further complexity. K8s everywhere and managed in one place - what more could an engineer want?
