As I am writing this blog (June/2021), Kubernetes is 7 years ago, and its adoption is undisputable. Five years ago, I created an automation procedure to deploy a Kubernetes cluster into IBM Cloud (at that time, it was called Softlayer). Since then, a lot has happened: Every cloud provider has…

Introduction The introduction of Operators made it very simple to install complicated things in OpenShift (and any Kubernetes environment). Take, for example, Splunk Enterprise. It used to take a long sequence of commands to install all the Kubernetes artifacts. Now, with the Splunk Operator (https://splunk.github.io/splunk-operator/), …

(This article is written in collaboration with Ernese Norelus) Recently, a co-worker asked me my point of view regarding OpenShift resilience. There are undoubtedly many aspects and misconceptions related to resilience in OpenShift (or any Kubernetes environment), and here are some off the top of my head. 1. Container resilience is not enough. You also need cluster resilience Kubernetes (hence OpenShift)…

Introduction In a previous blog (https://medium.com/ibm-garage/deploying-ibm-app-connect-with-a-single-command-fc02e4887228), I described how to deploy IBM App Connect with a single command. Well, AppConnect is part of Cloud Pak for Integration, which has other components. In this blog, I will describe how to deploy IBM MQ, another component of the same Cloud Pak, then…

Introduction MongoDB has an interesting feature of providing replication across multiple instances, using replica set (This is mongo replica set, not the Kubernetes resource type with the same name). You can read more about MongoDB replication at https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/replication/. Now, let’s talk about multiple clusters. One great benefit of using MongoDB replication…

Introduction In my last blog, I described how to deploy IBM API Connect using the command line. I showed the sequence of commands, then provided a script that does it all. API Connect is just one of the components of the Cloud Pak for Integration. …

Introduction — In my last blog, I showed how to make a simple Kubernetes application resilient. To do so, I had to wrap some key code around a transaction lock to guarantee that only one request is updating the database at a time. But there is still an issue with the current…

Introduction — Kubernetes provides a great level of resilience for container-based applications. If a Pod dies and is part of a ReplicaSet, DaemonSet, or StatefulSet, Kubernetes will restart it without user interaction. But the question is the following, “Is this feature good enough to make an application highly-available?” In this blog, I…

Written in collaboration with Rengan Sundararaman Introduction After you install Cloud Pak for Integration, you get a nice Platform Navigator, where you can deploy the Cloud Pak for Integration components. From there, you can click the “Add new instance” button, fill the parameters, and deploy the component. However, there are many…