Percona Cloud Native Series 1The cloud-native landscape matures every day, and new great tools and products continue to appear. We are starting a series of blog posts that are going to focus on new tools in the container and cloud-native world, and provide a holistic view through the prism of Percona products.

In this blog:

  • VMware Tanzu Community edition
  • Data on Kubernetes survey
  • Azure credits for open source projects
  • Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL Operator is GA
  • kube-fledged
  • kubescape
  • m3o – new generation public cloud

VMware Tanzu Community Edition

I personally like this move by VMware to open source Tanzu, the set of products to run and manage Kubernetes clusters and applications. Every time I deploy Amazon EKS I feel like I’ve been punished for something. With VMware Tanzu, deployment of the cluster on Amazon (not EKS) is a smooth experience. It has its own quirks, but still much much better.

Tanzu Community Edition is not only about AWS EKS, but also other public clouds and even local environments with docker.

I also was able to successfully deploy Percona Operators on the Tanzu provisioned cluster. Keep in mind that you need a storage class to be created to run stateful workloads. It can be easily done with Tanzu’s packaging system.

Data on Kubernetes Survey

The Data on Kubernetes (DoK) community does a great job in promoting and evangelizing stateful workloads on Kubernetes. I strongly recommend you check out the DoK 2021 report that was released this week. Key takeaways:

  • Kubernetes is on the rise (nothing new). Half of the respondents run 50% or more of production workloads in k8s.
  • K8S is ready to run stateful workloads – 90% think so, and 70% already run data on k8s.
  • The key benefits of running stateful applications on Kubernetes:
    • Consistency
    • Standardizing
    • Simplify management
    • Enable develop self-service
  • Operators help with:
    • Management
    • Scalability
    • Improve app lifecycle mgmt

There are lots of other interesting data points, I encourage you to go through them.

Azure Credits for Open Source Projects

Percona’s motto is “Keeping Open Source Open”, which is why an announcement from Microsoft to issue Azure credits for open source projects caught our attention. This is a good move from Microsoft helping the open source community to certify products on Azure without spending a buck.

Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL Operator is GA

I cannot miss the opportunity to share with you that Percona’s PostgreSQL Operator has reached the General Availability stage. It was a long journey for us and we were constantly focused on improving the quality of our Operator through introduction of rigorous end-to-end testing. Please read more about this release on the PostgreSQL news mailing list. I also encourage you to look into our GitHub repository and try out the Operator by following these installation instructions.

kube-fledged

Back in the days of my Operations career, I was looking for an easy way to have container images pre-pulled on my Kubernetes nodes. kube-fledged does exactly this. The most common use cases are applications that require rapid start-up or some batch-processing which is fired randomly. If we talk about Percona Operators, then kube-fledged is useful if you scale your databases frequently and don’t want to waste valuable seconds on pulling the image. I have tried it out for Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL Operator and it worked like a charm.

kube-fledged is an operator and it controls which images to pull to the nodes with ImageCache custom resource. I have prepared an ImageCachemanifest for Percona PostgreSQL Operator as an example – please find it here. This instructs kube-fledge to pull the images that we use in PostgreSQL cluster deployment on all nodes.

kubescape

In every container-related survey, we see security as one of the top concerns. kubescape is a neat tool to test if Kubernetes and apps are deployed securely as defined in National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CICA) Hardening Guidance.

It provides both details and a summary of failures. Here is for example the failure of Resource policy control for containers for default Percona MongoDB Operator deployment:

It might be a good idea for developers to add kubescape into the CICD pipeline to get additional automated security policy checks.

M3O – New Generation Public Cloud

“M3O is an open source AWS alternative built for the next generation of developers. Consume public APIs as simpler programmable building blocks for a 10x better developer experience.” – not my words, but from their website – m3o.com. In a nutshell, it is a set of APIs to greatly simplify the development. In m3o’s GitHub repo there is an example of how to build the Reddit Clone utilizing these APIs only. You can explore available APIs here. As an example I used URL shortener API for this blog post link:

Looks neat! For now, most of the APIs are free to use, but I assume this is going to change soon once the project gets more traction and grows its user base.

It is also important to note, that this is an open source project, meaning that anyone can deploy their own M3O platform on Kubernetes (yes, k8s again) and have these APIs exposed privately and for free, not as a SaaS offering. See m3o/platform repo for more details and Pulumi example to deploy it.

Complete the 2021 Percona Open Source Data Management Software Survey

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