A few short years ago, espousing for open source and cloud computing was even more difficult than touting the importance of clean energy and the realities of climate change. The doubters and naysayers, vocal as they are, are full of reasons why things are (fine) as they are. Reasons, however, don’t get you results. We needed transformative action in IT, and today, as we’re right between the Google NEXT event and the OpenStack Summit in Austin, open source and cloud are the norm for the majority.
After pausing for a moment of vindication – we told you so – we get back to work to improve further and look forward, and a good place to look is indeed at Google: a technology trailblazer by sheer necessity. We heard a lot about the GCP at NEXT, especially their open source project Kubernetes, powering GKE. What’s most exciting about such container-based computing with Docker is that we’ve finally hit the sweet spot in the stack with the right abstractions for developers and infrastructure & ops pros. With this innovation now accessible to all in the Kubernetes project, Google’s infrastructure for everyone else (#GIFEE) and NoOps is within reach. Best of all, the change this time around is less transformative and more incremental…
One thing you’ll like about a serverless architecture stack like Kubernetes, is that you can run it on bare-metal if you want the best performance possible, but you can easily run it on top of IaaS providing VMs in public or private cloud, and that benefits us with a great deal of flexibility in so many ways. Then of course if you just want to deploy workloads, and not worry about the stack, an aaS offering like GKE or ECS is a great way to get to NoOps faster. We have a level playing field across public and private and a variety of underpinnings.
For those that are not only using a public micro-service stack aaS offering like GKE, but supplementing or fully building one internally with Kubernetes or a PaaS on top of it like OpenShift, you’ll need some support. Just like you didn’t build an OpenStack IaaS by yourself (I hope), there’s no reason to go it alone for your serverless architecture micro-services stack. There’s many parts under the hood, and one of them you need baked into your stack from the get go is software-definedsecure networking. It was a pleasure to get back in touch with my developer roots and put together a demo of how you can solve your networking and security microsegmentation challenges using OpenContrail.
I’ve taken the test setup for OpenContrail with OpenShift, and forked and modified it to create a pure demo cluster of OpenContrail + OpenShift (thus including Kubernetes) showing off the OpenContrail features with Kubernetes and OpenShift. If you learn by doing like me, then maybe best of all, this demo cluster is also open source and Ansible-automated to easily stand up or tear down on AWS with just a few commands to go from nada to a running OpenShift and OpenContrail consoles with a running sample app. Enjoy getting your hands dirty, or sit back and watch demo video.
If you are looking to setup and run this demo yourself, please see: https://github.com/jameskellynet/container-networking-ansible
