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NKE Lab series – Ep5: Build a GitOps CD pipeline using GitHub, NKE and Argo CD

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 20:36:31 +0000

This is the 5th episode of our NKE lab series. In this episode, I will demonstrate how you can easily build a fully-automated GitOps continues delivery (CD) pipeline, by using Github, NKE and Argo CD.

GitOps is a operational framework that takes DevOps best practices (such as version control, Infra-as-Code, CI/CD etc), and applies them to modern and cloud native infrastructure such as Kubernetes-based clusters.

There are two GitOps approaches: Push-based and Pull-based, and you can reach more about each model at here. This post will focus on the Pull-based approach as it provides many benefits such as better version control and governance, more automation and self-service capabilities, and easier for rollback, auditing/compliance suitable for large and stable production environment.

NKE Lab series – Ep4: Accelerate K8s application development using NKE with Nutanix Database (NDB)

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 15:05:44 +0000

This is the 4th episode of our NKE lab series. Previously, I have demonstrated how you can easily deploy a NKE cluster in a Nutanix CE lab environment, and I have explored some NKE platform features including out-of-the-box CSI and CNI support. In this episode, we’ll take a look how you can accelerate Kubernetes application development by integrating NKE with Nutanix Database Service (NDB).

NDB is a Database-as-a-Service designed to help developers speed up application development and simplify database administration across on-prem and public clouds. It simplifies database operations such as test DB provisioning/cloning and integrated snapshots/backup etc. It also provides a consistent “Database-as-Code” experience using REST API and K8s integrations. NDB supports most popular database engines, and you can read more about it at here.

NKE lab series – Ep3: Deep dive into NKE networking with Calico CNI

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 20:11:10 +0000

This is the 3rd episode of our NKE lab series. Previously, I have walked through:

In this episode, we’ll deep dive into the NKE networking spaces by exploring the following:

PART-1: Exploring Calico CNI deployment models within a NKE cluster
PART-2: Applying standard Kubernetes network policy in a NKE cluster
PART-3: Leveraging Calico specific policies in a NKE cluster

pre-requisites

a 1-node or 3-node Nutanix CE 2.0 cluster deployed in nested virtualization depending on your lab compute capacity, as documented here and here
a NKE-enabled K8s cluster deployed in Nutanix CE (see Ep1)
a Guestbook demo app deployed onto the NKE cluster (see Ep2)
a lab network environment supports VLAN tagging and provides basic infra services such as AD, DNS, NTP etc (these are required when installing the CE cluster)
a Linux/Mac workstation for managing the Kubernetes cluster, with Kubectl installed

PART-1: Exploring Calico CNI models in NKE

Calico is recognized as the most popular CNI plugins within he Kubernetes community, and it has been widely deployed in production thanks to its reliable performance and comprehensive networking and security features.

NKE lab series – Ep2: Deploy a multi-tier web application on a NKE cluster using persistent storage with Nutanix CSI

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:50:58 +0000

This is the 2nd episode of our NKE lab series. In the 1st episode, I have demonstrated how you can easily deploy an enterprise-grade NKE cluster in a Nutanix CE lab environment with nested virtualization.

In this episode, we’ll deploy a containerized multi-tier web application onto our NKE cluster, by leveraging the built-in Nutanix CSI driver to provide persistent storage for the demo app.

Specifically, we’ll explore 2x Nutanix CSI options:

Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) lab series – Ep1: Create a NKE-enabled Kubernetes Cluster on Nutanix Community Edition (CE)

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:15:47 +0000

This blog is the 1st episode of a Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) home lab series. In this post, I will walk through the detailed process of deploying an enterprise-ready NKE-enabled Kubernetes cluster within a Nutanix CE environment.

Nutanix CE is a free version of Nutanix AOS, which powers the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. It is designed for people interested in test driving Nutanix platform features and capabilities in a non-production or PoC environment. Even better, Nutanix CE also works in a nested virtualization deployment on top of ESXi/vSphere. This makes it perfect for hands-on testing or exploring in a safe environment such as home-lab, which is exactly what I’m running here!