CNW #9: Kubernetes Gateway API, Kubernetes Goat Project

This week we will look into Kubernetes Gateway API, Kubernetes GOAT project and some recent cloud announcements.

Dear Readers,

I hope you are doing well and I believe many of you are excited about KubeCon at Valencia, happening this week.

Let’s look into the top 5 things I would like to share with you that has got my attention.

1️⃣ Deep dive into Kubernetes Gateway API

In the recent years, a lot of vendors such as Traefik, Istio, Ambassador Labs etc were creating gateway and ingress products with more advanced features, thus solving a common problem. SIG Network has introduced Gateway API in the Kubernetes with the specification to define the Gateway and the Service Routing. This is not a replace of Ingress. This is going to standardise the specs with multiple vendors implementing the same with some differentiating features. Nico Vibert has written a deep dive into Kubernetes gateway API in his blog post.

This week, Envoy also published their new project which is related to Gateway API which aims to merge the core of light weight gateways like Contour and Emissary. I am really excited about this evolving section in the cloud native landscape.

2️⃣ Tour of Wasm Ecosystem

A lot of us might have played DOS games as the first thing when introduced to the computers. At least, it was the first thing I saw as a Kid when I saw computers. Here are some of the games you play in the browser and revive the memory.

Now, wondering how these games are related to WASM?

WASM is the short for Web Assembly which allow the load-time efficient binary code to run in your browser in a sandbox (safe). This allows developers to provide native experience on web which is not so easy with other web technologies.

These tour of the ecosystem gives you an introduction to what is possible with WASM currently and how developers are building on it.

3️⃣ How energy efficient are your Kubernetes deployments?

As lot of companies are following the sustainability engineering trend, it is important to understand how much power efficient we are as Kubernetes becomes the defacto cloud platform.

Kepler uses ebpf to probe the energy related system stats and export to prometheus metrics.

4️⃣ Let’s get Hacking — Kubernetes Goat

Madhu Akula has written a vulnerable cluster known as Kubernetes Goat where you can learn and practice security. The project docs are filled with a lot of scenarios you can try yourself and improve your Kubernetes security skills. Really nice logo btw!

You can try it on the online playground.

5️⃣ Some Cloud Announcements

Last week as full of announcements from Google IO and Platform Week of Cloudflare. I am taking few items which have got my attention and useful for building cloud native apps.

Google:

• AlloyDB - It is a PostgreSQL database with column storage and uses Google’s machine learning on top of their high scale storage tier. It is going to provide 100x performance for analytical workload on Postgresql.

• Cloud Run Jobs - Now you can run jobs on Cloud Run. Cloud Run is a fasted way to build some apps with minimal infra setup in very economical way. This will be a good addition to the serverless infrastructure in Google Cloud.

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare is building serverless offering on the edge and probably one of the best platform to build something on the edge. It uses Workers (thing FaaS on edge) to provide compute very close to the users.

• D1 - It is their first SQL database as a service built using SQLite with a good free tier. It can be directly used with Cloudflare Workers.

• R2 - S3 compliant durable storage. Main differentier is that they don’t charge for egress.

These services will be really helpful to offload some of the compute closer to the end users to improve performance.

---

Play with freshly baked Kubernetes 1.24 in this empty cluster. 🎉 https://killercoda.com/kubecon