Running Kubernetes in Production

Early on in my career, I've had the chance to work on a variety of projects that required me to set up and maintain Kubernetes clusters. I've learned a lot about the best practices for running Kubernetes in production and have written about some of the challenges and solutions I've encountered along the way. Here are some of my thoughts on the topic.

Apr 23, 2023

Extending the Kubernetes Scheduler

Kubernetes is equally loved and loathed for its extreme flexibility which comes with a high cost of complexity. For a research project, I was looking into ways to extend the Kubernetes Scheduler (kube-scheduler) with awareness of FPGAs. More precisely, I wanted to make sure that each node could advertise several FPGA “slots”, to which a pod could be bound to. Each of these slots only supports one attached application at a time, for which they are reconfigured. The FPGA architecture details are, though very interesting, not the focus of this post. Instead, we’re going to explore the ways Kubernetes allows us to extend the built-in scheduling process to support additional compute resources....Systems Architecture, Kubernetes

Aug 11, 2019

Inspecting Kubernetes Deployment Logs with kail

When systems start behaving strangely, inspecting live data becomes a vital part of managing operations of any scale. In addition to actual metrics like request throughput, database operations, and resource usage, real-time service logs are a fundamental piece of information about the health of your infrastructure....Kubernetes

Jun 02, 2019

Accessing Kubernetes services locally using kubefwd

When deploying your applications to Kubernetes, sometimes you might need to access cluster-internal services without exposing them to the general public. Maybe an API endpoint is behaving strangely, or you need to collect locally-stored metrics: Whatever problem you're encountering, tunneling into your cluster will allow you to send requests against internal services and gather more details about the situation....Kubernetes

Feb 28, 2019

Setting up Kubernetes Dashboard

Welcome back to the short series about getting started with Kubernetes, the practical way! If you haven't read the first post on provisioning a cluster and haven't set up your first cluster yet, please do that first and come back here. If you're running your cluster on Google's Kubernetes Engine, chances are that integrated metrics and services like Stackdriver are already great for monitoring your Kubernetes cluster, in that case, you might not actually need to deploy the following application....Kubernetes