The container wars are over. Kubernetes has won. The fact that Docker even integrates it in it’s desktop version says enough. But creating and maintaining a K8S cluster is still hard. You need to know a lot of the internals of Kubernetes, like etcd, overlay networking and more. And you need to be an expert in all the components: ingress, configmaps, pods and so on. So think twice before creating and managing your own cluster. Instead, choose one of the managed Kubernetes services.

Running Kubernetes in the cloud

Until a few months ago, your best (and probably only) option to run a cluster in the cloud was GKE. But things have changed. There are a lot of viable alternatives. So I decided to write a blog about these alternatives. In my blog I cover Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Tectonic by CoreOs, Azure Container Service (AKS), Openshift by Red Hat and Rancher 2.0. All of  them are fully managed and take care of upgrading, scaling and monitoring your cluster. And if you reall want to run your own Kubernetes, take a look at the various tools that exist to spin up a cluster. These tools are maturing pretty quickly. Just keep in mind: managing a cluster is harder than just creating one!

Read more on the blogpost on Instruqt

Learning by doing

If you want to try out Kubernetes yourself, learn more about it on Instruqt. It offers online courses and tracks for DevOps tools and Cloud services. By solving challenges, you will learn new stuff by doing, instead of watching video’s or following boring tutorials. Try it out for yourself and create an account on Instruqt. And please let us know what you think, we love to get your feedback. And if you are interested in using Instruqt in your company, let’s get a coffee!

A screenshot of the online course for Kubernetes

This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the last blogpost of this series I want to talk about Environment-as-code pipeline and individual pipelines.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the seventh blogpost of this series I want to talk about Explicit Dependency Management.

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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the sixth blogpost of this series I want to talk about Dealing with secrets.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the fifth blogpost of this series I want to talk about Secure Containerized Delivery.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the fourth blogpost of this series I want to talk about Group Managed Service Accounts.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the third blogpost of this series I want to talk about Keeping your Windows Containers up-to-date.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the second blogpost of this series I want to talk about
Multi-stage builds.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on October 13th, 2017.

During the past year I supported several clients in their journey toward Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack. In this blogseries I’d like to share the eight practices I learned while practicing Containerized Delivery on the Microsoft stack using Docker, both in a Greenfield and in a Brownfield situation. In the first blogpost of this series I want to talk about the first practice: Small and reusable image layers.
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This post is originally published as article within SDN Magazine on February 28th, 2017.

One of the hot topics within the Microsoft development community right now is undoubtedly the “container” topic. Following the success of both Docker and containers on Linux, Microsoft developed a Windows container implementation on Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. After two and a half years of development plus one year of running this container technology in preview for insiders (Windows Server 2016 TP3 – TP5), September of 2016 finally saw Microsoft’s announcement that it had released Windows Server 2016 to the public.

While the container technology and Containerized Delivery have been used by non-Microsoft focused enterprises for a few years now (Linux has had its container technology since August 2008), the Microsoft community is only at the beginning of this new journey. This is, therefore, the perfect moment to ask ourselves whether we should care about Windows containers, and whether we should look into the structure of this new technology. However, before we take a more detailed look at Windows container technology, let’s look at the way in which we have been delivering our applications for the past 10 years.

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