cloud native apps

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 8: Monitoring Tool Overview

04/24/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

I had received a few questions about the monitoring capabilities for VMware PKS and some of the VMware tools that can help provide visibility and audibility of the platform. Different consumers of PKS will care about different things, as you can imagine the cloud admin/platform operator is primarily concerned with the underlying infrastructure (compute, storage, network) including the PKS Management components. Developers want to know how their application is doing and if there are any issues, how to quickly access the information they need to debug and fix the problem.

Logging

Complete end-to-end logging is a mandatory requirement for many customers, especially when it comes to dealing with large and complex application deployments. Being able to provide centralized access of all logs to both operators and developers is key to be able to quickly triage and resolve an issue. Remote syslog can be configured throughout the PKS stack from the infrastructure and going all the way up to the application if developers decides to instrument logging and sending it to the same syslog target. VMware customers can take advantage of vRealize Log Insight (vSphere customers receive 25 free OSI licenses) which is a on-premises log management solution. If you prefer a SaaS-based solution, VMware also has Log Intelligence which can be used to service both premises infrastructure as well as other cloud hosted deployments.

Infrastructure Monitoring

For Cloud Admins/Platform Operators, vRealize Operations Manager (vROPs) will be the tool of choice which many of our customers are already familiar with. vROps provides analytics, capacity management and alerting for all of your underlying compute, storage and networking infrastructure. This information can be trended over time and provide help proactive identify any anomalies within the infrastructure before they arise. There are a number of Management Packs that can be used to provide easy to consume and out of the box dashboards such as vSphere which gives you information about your vCenter Server and the ESXi hypervisor, NSX-V as well as NSX-T for networking/security and core storage including VSAN.

Application Monitoring

Unlike traditional applications, Cloud Native Apps require a completely different way of monitoring to ensure Developers can easily access the important information they require for development purposes. VMware Wavefront is a SaaS-based solution that is metrics monitoring and analytics platform that can handle the high-scale requirements of modern cloud-native applications. Not only can Developers instrument their own applications and forward that to Wavefront, but Wavefront also provides complete visibility into a Kubernetes (K8S) deployment from namespaces, nodes, pods and all the way down to the individual containers.

Here is a diagram to help illustrate the visibility that each solution provides:

In the next three posts, I walk through the configuration steps to setup vRLI, vROPs and Wavefront with VMware PKS.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 7: Harbor

04/10/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

Now that we have a functional PKS deployment, an optional but very useful add-on to deploy and integrate with PKS is the VMware Harbor solution. Harbor is an Enterprise-class container registry that customers can run within their own Datacenter to securely store and provide access to container images used by their development teams. The process of deploying Harbor is similiar to PKS. You will need to download the Harbor Tile from Pivotal Network, import that into Ops Manager and then configure and deploy using the same interface.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 6: Kubernetes Go!

04/04/2018 by William Lam 8 Comments

In this article, we will walk through the two workflows, one from the perspective of the Cloud/Platform Operator and how to create a new PKS Cluster to how it will be consumed by the Developer which is simply accessing the Kubernetes API endpoint and does not have to know anything about how it was provisioned or even access to the underlying PKS infrastructure. I think most of you have probably been waiting for this part of the series to see PKS in action and demonstrate how easy it is to manage and consume K8S Clusters.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 5: PKS Control Plane

04/02/2018 by William Lam 3 Comments

Continuing with our PKS installation, we are now going to finish up with configuring and deploying the PKS Control Plane Tile which provides a frontend API that will be used by Cloud/Platform Operators to easily interact with PKS for provisioning and managing (create, delete, list, scale up/down) Kubernetes (K8S) Clusters. Once a K8S Cluster has successfully been deployed through PKS, operators simply provide their developers the external hostname of the K8S Cluster and the kubectl configuration file and they can immediately start deploying applications without knowing anything about PKS and how it works! If an application that a developer is deploying requires an external load balancer service, they can easily specify that in their application deployment YAML file and behind the scenes, PKS will automatically provision on-demand an NSX-T Load Balancer to service the application and this is completely seamless and does not require any additional assistance from the operator.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 4: Ops Manager & BOSH

03/29/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

In this article, we will begin our PKS installation by deploying Pivotal Ops Manager which provides a management interface (UI/API) for Cloud/Platform Operators to manage the complete lifecycle of both BOSH and PKS from install, patch and upgrade. In addition, you can also deploy new application services using Ops Manager Tiles like adding an Enterprise-class Container Registry like VMware Harbor which can then be configured to work with PKS or any other solution that you may have deployed using Ops Manager.

As part of the the Ops Manager deployment, we will also install the BOSH Tile which is responsible for managing, provisioning, monitoring and self-healing of the VMs that make up a Kubernetes (K8S) Cluster deployment within PKS. BOSH supports a number of IaaS platforms which includes vSphere and through their Cloud Provider Interface (CPI), it will ensure the VMs are always up and in some cases, it may even delete and simply re-deploy VMs if they become unresponsive. This is all done completely automated without any interaction from the Cloud/Platform Operator which means for Developers, they can rest assure whatever SLA or High Availability options that have been defined as part of their application deployment, the underlying platform will ensure those requirements will always be met.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here:

Getting started with VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) Part 3: NSX-T

03/28/2018 by William Lam 6 Comments

In this article, we are now going to start configuring NSX-T so that it will be ready for us to install PKS and consume the networking and security services provided by NSX-T. The result is that PKS can deliver on demand provisioning of all NSX-T components: Container Network Interface (CNI), NSX-T Container Plugin (NCP) POD, NSX Node Agent POD, etc) automatically when a new Kubernetes (K8S) Cluster is requested, all done with a single CLI or API call. In addition, PKS also provides a unique capability through its integration with NSX-T to enable network micro-segmentation at the K8S namespace level which allows Cloud/Platform Operators to manage access between application and/or tenant users at at a much finer grain level than was possible before which is really powerful!

As mentioned in the previous blog post, I will not be walking through a step-by-step NSX-T installation and I will assume that you already have a basic NSX-T environment deployed which includes a few ESXi host prepped as Transport Nodes and at least 1 NSX-T Controller and 1 NSX-T Edge. If you would like a detailed step by step walk through, you can refer to the NSX-T documentation here or you can even leverage my Automated NSX-T Lab Deployment script to setup the base environment and modify based on the steps in this article. In fact, this is the same script I have used to deploy my own NSX-T environment for PKS with some minor modification which I will be sharing at a later date.

If you missed any of the previous articles, you can find the complete list here: