September 2020 Summaries

Edge Stack Kubernetes Migration Guide The Edge Stack Kubernetes-native API Gateway offers a modern standard for cloud-native teams by providing improved performance, reduced costs, and increased scalability. This solution is built on top of Envoy Proxy, an open-source ecosystem maintained by a large number of organizations, including Ambassador Labs. The Edge Stack API Gateway supports various protocols, including HTTP/3, WebSockets, gRPC, and raw TCP connections, while also offering features such as TLS termination, rate limiting, authentication, and monitoring. It can dynamically reconfigure itself without downtime, enabling platform teams and developers to manage configuration at any scale. With performance improvements of up to 5x compared to older gateways, Edge Stack offers a cost-effective solution for migrating to a cloud-native API Gateway. By partnering with experts who have helped hundreds of companies adopt Kubernetes, organizations can easily migrate to this modern solution and support their digital transformation and future growth into the cloud native ecosystem.

This tutorial aims to set up a production-quality Kubernetes cluster on AWS for small teams with limited operations experience or budget. It provides a simple and modern web application architecture, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) commodity infrastructure such as RDS Aurora, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, or Redis. The tutorial assumes a single developer team with no prior experience in bootstrapping a microservices system, and guides them through setting up an AWS account, creating a VPC, subnets, DNS, and Terraform state storage, generating the Kubernetes cluster, and applying it to their environment. The tutorial covers technical design decisions such as the use of a monorepo, independent Git branches for fabrics, and configuration of availability zones, network, and SSH key pairs. It also provides guidance on how to make the setup cheaper by using smaller EC2 instance sizes and purchasing reserved instances.

The stability vs velocity tradeoff is a critical consideration in development workflows, with organizations needing to balance these competing demands to meet their business needs. As applications grow, ensuring updates don't negatively impact users becomes more important, often requiring more stringent release criteria and better testing. However, this can come at the cost of reduced velocity. To address this challenge, multiple development workflows are needed for different parts of an application, with microservices architecture allowing for independent development workflows for each service. Building a standard set of tools and processes that support these different modes of development is both easy and hard, requiring operational skills and capabilities beyond just coding. Ultimately, the goal is to find a balance between stability and velocity that meets the needs of the business and users.