Jonathan Johnson

Kubernetes for Developers - 3 Day Deep Dive

9:00 AM MDT

At the end of this workshop, you will be comfortable with designing, deploying, managing, monitoring and updating a coordinated set of applications running on Kubernetes.

Distributed application architectures are hard. Building containers and designing microservices to work and coordinate together across a network is complex. Given limitations on resources, failing networks, defective software, and fluctuating traffic you need an orchestrator to handle these variants. Kubernetes is designed to handle these complexities, so you do not have to. It's essentially a distributed operating system across your data center. You give Kubernetes containers and it will ensure they remain available.
 
Kubernetes continues to gain momentum and is quickly becoming the preferred way to deploy applications.
 
In this workshop, we’ll grasp the essence of Kubernetes as an application container manager, learning the concepts of deploying, pods, services, ingression, volumes, secrets, and monitoring. We’ll look at how simple containers are quickly started using a declarative syntax. We'll build on this with a coordinated cluster of containers to make an application. Next, we will learn how Helm is used for managing more complex collections of containers. See how your application containers can find and communicate directly or use a message broker for exchanging data. We will play chaos monkey and mess with some vital services and observe how Kubernetes self-heals back to the expected state. Finally, we will observe performance metrics and see how nodes and containers are scaled.
 
Come to this workshop the learn how to deploy and manage your containerized application. On the way, you will see how Kubernetes effectively schedules your application across its resources.

Optionally, for more daring and independent attendees, you can also replicate many of the exercises on your local laptop with Minikube or Minishift. There are other Kubernetes flavors as well. However, if during the workshop you are having troubles please understand we cannot deviate too far to meet your local needs. If you do want to try some of the material locally this stack is recommended:

• Linux, Windows 10 or MacOS laptop with 4 core processor (I7 equivalent) 16 gig memory. Ensure your CPU virtualization BIOS switch is turned on. Some company issued laptops may lock this access.
• Preinstall the latest versions of Minikube, KubeCtl, and Helm.
• Minikube works best with a recent version of VirtualBox.

Some of the topics we will explore:

• Using Minikube, KubeCtl and Helm
• Kubernetes Architecture and terminology
• Resilience with declarative states and the reconciliation loop
• Kubernetes REST API
• Components: Etcd, Scheduler, Controller, Kubelet
• Namespaces
• Kinds: Pod, Service, Deployment, ReplicaSet, Ingress
• Labels and selectors
• Etcd, ConfigMaps, Secrets
• Volumes and mounts
• Ingress
• Helm and charts
• Container patterns
• Probes, Logging, monitoring, and troubleshooting
• Scaling
• Standard and custom resources
• Operators
• Istio
• Kubernetes ecosystem for software engineers

These concepts are presented and reinforced with hands-on exercises:

• Advantages of distributed computing
• History and rise of Kubernetes
• Cloud native computing foundation
• Architecture and terms and how it works
• Deploying and running applications
• Kubernetes objects - Deployment, Pods, ConfigMaps, Jobs, Secrets, Ingress, Volumes and many more
• Container patterns
• Serverless
• Istio Meshing
• Monitoring

You will leave with a solid understanding of how Kubernetes actually works and a set of hands-on exercises your can share with your peers. Bring a simple laptop with a standard browser for a full hands-on experience.

Kubernetes Koncepts

9:00 AM MDT

You have some modular code with a REST API. You are on your way to Microservices. Next, you package it in a container image that others can run. Simple. Now what? Your service needs to log information, needs to scale and load balance between its clones. Your service needs environment and metadata way outside its context. What about where the service will run? Who starts it? What monitors its health? What about antifragility? Updates? Networking? Oh my.

Don't get flustered. We will explore how Kubernetes simplifies the complexity of distributed computing.

This session will help you understand the terms, architecture and the mechanics of the Kubernetes tools. You will understand how to target your applications to a seemingly complex distributed compute platform.

Kubernetes Koncepts (continued)

10:45 AM MDT

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts (1 of 2)

Aha moments with apps in containers can be quite liberating. The mobile space is saturated with “there's an app for that”. For us, we now expect “there's a container for that”. “Write once, run anywhere” (WORA) has changed to “Package once, run anywhere” (PORA). The growing community of containers is riding up the hype curve. We will look at many ways to assemble pods using architecture patterns you already know.

Your software package delivery and installation is no longer an rpm, deb, dmg, jar, war, native executable or a run script, it is simply an image that has a common run container command.

During the presentation, we will explore some examples on Katacoda.

Konsumer Driven Kontracts

1:30 PM MDT

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes be sure to attend: Kubernetes Koncepts

At the 2009 Agile conference, J.B.Rainsberger declared “Integration tests are a scam”. I agree. Come see some compelling reasons why consumer-driven contract testing is a much better approach. Particularly for microservices.

We will explore different testing techniques on Kubernetes, including an important one called “Consumer-Driven Contracts”.

After a brief overview of the concepts a live demonstration will show you how to:

1. set up a Pact Broker on Kubernetes
2. write a consumer that defines and publishes Pact contracts
3. deploy and run a few Spring Boot microservices on Kubernetes
4. connect microservices to a database and public data source
5. verify the consumer pacts against a producer
6. find API defects and fix them

Weaving Code Analysis with Your Team

3:15 PM MDT

This is the droid you are looking for. Within this droid are hundreds of rules designed to review your code for defects, hotspots and security weaknesses. Consider the resulting analysis as humble feedback from a personal advisor. The rules come from your community of peers, all designed to save your butt.

We will explore techniques on how to add these checks to your IDE, your build scripts and your build pipelines.

Too much chatter in your pull requests? See how the analysis tools teach best practices, without ego or criticism, to a spectrum of developers. As a leader see how to develop an effective code quality intern program around this technique. We will also see some techniques to use Kubernetes to obtain reports and dashboards right on your local machine and from your continuous integration pipeline.