In my last blog I explained how to deploy our Cloud Native Starter project on Minishift. Since early June 2019 there is a Red Hat OpenShift beta available on the IBM Cloud. It is currently based on OpenShift 3.11 and is a managed offering like the IBM Kubernetes Service on IBM Cloud. Our cloud native starter project is mostly based on Open Source technology and free offerings but while OpenShift is Open Source it is not free. During the beta there are no license fees but OpenShift does not run on the free cluster available with the IBM Kubernetes Service.

Initially I thought that different Kubernetes environments are more or less identical. I have learned in the past weeks that some of them are more and some are less so and there are always differences so here are my notes on deployments on Minishift. As a seasoned OpenShift user you might find it strange why I describe the obvious but if you come from a plain Kubernetes background like I did, this maybe helpful. Since I am still a noob in all things OpenShift maybe things are really done differently?

Over the last weeks we have worked intensively on our Cloud Native Starter project and made a lot of progress. It is an example of a microservices architecture based on Java, Kubernetes, and Istio. We have developed and tested it on Minikube and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

Logging and Monitoring have always been important but in a distributed microservices architecture on a Kubernetes cluster it is even more important: watching the ever changing components of a cluster is like “guarding a bag of fleas” as the German proverb says. Even our demo “Cloud Native Starter” has at least 4 or 5 pods running that all create logs that at some point when something doesn’t work you need to look at. There are plenty of articles around logging in a Kubernetes cluster with many different solutions. What is important to me as a developer is that I don’t want to care about maintaining it. I need a logging and monitoring solution but I want somebody else to keep it running for me. Fortunately, IBM Cloud is offering that in the form of “IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA” and “IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig”.

In my last blog I have described a project we are working on: Cloud Native Starter. It is a microservices architecture, written mostly in Java with Eclipse MicroProfile, and using many Istio features. We started to deploy on Minikube because that is easy to implement if you have a reasonably powerful notebook. Now that everything works on Minikube, I wanted to deploy it on the IBM Cloud, too, using IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS).

I have recently started to work on a new project “Cloud Native Starter” where we want to build a sample polyglot microservices application with Java and Node.js on Kubernetes (Minikube) using Istio for traffic management, tracing, metrics, fault injection, fault tolerance, etc.