June 2022 Summaries

The article explores the performance of HTTP/3 compared to its predecessors HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1 in a real-world benchmarking setup using Ambassador Edge Stack and Envoy Proxy. The testing involved measuring latency and round-trip times for three different websites with varying sizes and chattiness levels, served over two different hostnames configured for TLS v1.2 and v1.3, respectively. The results showed that HTTP/3 outperformed HTTP/1.1 across all site sizes, but its performance was closer to that of HTTP/2, especially when using TLS v1.3. However, in certain network conditions, HTTP/3 seemed to edge out HTTP/2. The study highlights the importance of considering specific use cases and network conditions when deciding between these protocols, and recommends experimenting with and deploying HTTP/3 support for forward-looking capabilities and handling potential geographic-specific degradation in networks.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that automates, deploys, scales, and manages containerized applications. It originated from Google's Borg project in 2003, which aimed to manage massive infrastructure hardware without degrading business revenue. Kubernetes was later succeeded by the Omega project and eventually became an open-source system run by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. A Kubernetes cluster is a collection of virtual or physical machines that manage and run containerized applications, consisting of master nodes and worker nodes. The control plane manages operations within the cluster, while the data plane runs containerized applications on worker nodes. Kubernetes objects are persistent entities used to represent the state of the cluster, including pods, replication controllers, replica sets, deployments, volumes, and services. These objects can be created using the kubectl command-line tool or other methods, and are managed by the Kubernetes system to ensure they always exist in the desired state. The deployment object creates a pod with one or more containers sharing storage and networking resources, while the service object exposes a container to access internal traffic or externally expose an application running on a node. Telepresence is a tool that redirects network traffic from a service in the cloud to a service or container on a local machine, allowing for rapid debugging and testing of Kubernetes services.

Kubernetes offers multiple deployment strategies to fit various integration and delivery use-cases. The canary deployment strategy allows for the incremental release of new features/code in production to minimize the impact and risk of new software updates, while a small subset of the workload or users is replaced with the newer version, and subsequent users/workloads are gradually transferred to the newer version. Istio provides various API objects in the networking.istio.io/v1alpha3 API group to simplify load balancing, routing, and other traffic management functions. Canary testing enables safe and incremental testing of new features and updates, less infrastructure requirement, and swift and smooth rollbacks. Istio can be used to simplify scalable canary deployments for Kubernetes workloads with intelligent routing features, allowing teams to connect, secure, and monitor microservices in a hybrid and multi-cloud production environment while enabling them to run secure, reliable Kubernetes applications anywhere.

GitLab is a single application that spans the entire software development lifecycle, providing platform engineers with tools to create, verify, manage, secure, release, and monitor software. Circle CI is a continuous integration and deployment tool that allows engineering teams to build, test, and deploy software using intelligent automation. GitHub Actions enables platform engineers to automate workflows from idea to production, while Kubernetes provides a tool for managing containerized applications. Ambassador Cloud solves the challenge of developing, viewing, and managing Kubernetes services across the entire software lifecycle. Drone is a continuous integration platform that automates pipeline configuration, testing, and deployment. Hashicorp Vault manages secrets and protects sensitive data. AWS provides computing power, database storage, serverless, content delivery, security, and identity solutions. Docker allows developers to bundle code and its dependencies into a single package that can run quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another. Ansible is an automation tool that handles configuration management, application deployment, and cloud provisioning. Terraform is the de-facto tool platform engineers use to write and deliver infrastructure as code. Platform engineers adopt tools that make them successful, focusing on specific issues and building great solutions around them. The right tools make platform engineers more productive and help companies achieve business goals faster.