The Ops Community ⚙️: Monikinderjit Singh

SaaS, PaaS and many more aaS..

Monikinderjit Singh — Sun, 29 May 2022 18:30:26 +0000

As the demand for cloud computing is increasing day by day, cloud providers are providing services which can make users use cloud services without much knowledge of the cloud or with greater flexibility in tools. The user can now decide to use a predefined cloud configuration or to create their resources according to their business needs.

These services are generally SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. We will go into deep about each and after reading this complete article you will know which service is best suited for you.

So let's dive into it.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service as the name suggests gives you to complete infrastructure(obviously virtual) on demand. Rather than having your own VMs, and database centre, you use the cloud provider's resources according to your demand.

Examples of IaaS:

AWS EC2
Google Compute Engine

Advantages of IaaS

High Flexibility
Less cost
High Scalability

When to refrain from using IaaS

Security
Maintenance

SaaS: Software as a Service

Software as a Service makes software available to users over the internet. They are ready to use. Users don't have to worry about used infrastructure. All the underlying architecture layers are handled by SaaS providers.

Examples of SaaS:

Google Apps
Slack

Advantages of SaaS

It- Ideal for startups

Security and maintenance are handled by the Service provider

When to refrain from using SaaS

No control
Less customization to features

PaaS: Platform as a Service

Platform as a Service delivers both software and hardware solutions to the user. It provides benefits for both IaaS and SaaS.

Examples of PaaS:

Google App Engine
AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Advantages of PaaS

Scalable
Speed To Release
Cost-Effective

When to refrain from using PaaS

Less Optimize for some tools
Integration constraint

Other than these 3 services, there are other services which come under XaaS(Anything-as-a-Service).

Examples:

CaaS(Communication as a Service): Services like IM, VoIP, and video conferencing are provided
DaaS(Desktop as a Service): Provides services like storing, and backing up user's desktop apps data
SECaaS(Security as a Service): Provides security from viruses, authentication and encryption and other security services which are then integrated with the company's infrastructure

and many more.

With the increasing demand of the business, several such services will be getting introduced and these services will be evolving or replaced by new demands.

I hope you like this article. If so, don't forget to give a heart.

You can connect with me on Twitter.

oh no, we have to Scale!!

Monikinderjit Singh — Sun, 29 May 2022 10:03:05 +0000

In the world of more than 3 billion internet users, it is really important to have a scalable architecture. Having an unscalable software is an invitation to grave for the software.

In this article, you will learn about scalability and its types.

Scalability

Scaling is the process of increasing or decreasing the containers, storage and network to meet the demand of availability to the new users.

The main purpose of scalability is to increase the resources when there is load outburst in less amount of time.

There are 2 types of scalability done in cloud:

Horizontal Scaling
Vertical Scaling

Horizontal Scaling

Horizontal Scaling is increasing/decreasing the number of machines to cope with new load.

Suppose, you are having your first day in a course lecture. You reach there and saw there is no empty bench for you. So what you will do? You will go and bring a table for you from another classroom.
This is an example of horizontal scaling(you horizontally scaled out).

via GIPHY

Best Suited for: Single machine applications(like websites)

Why horizontal Scaling is important?

Increases availability
Less downtime

Vertical Scaling

Vertical Scaling is increasing/decreasing the capability(storage, ram) of the machines to cope up with new load.

Suppose, you live on ground floor with 4 members. And you decide to marry and you need new room. You will start building a room at the 1st floor.

This is an example of vertical scaling(you vertically scaled up).

via GIPHY

Best Suited for: Difficult to distribute applications(like databases)

Why Vertical Scaling is important?

Less Maintenance
Avoid Latency

Cloud Autoscaling

Automatically scaling the resources according to the load and configuration is known as autoscaling in cloud. Many cloud service providers provide functionality of resource based pricing. AWS have auto scaling groups, GCP has instance groups. GCP has cloud spanner database which has the power of vertical scaling up the database.

You can connect with me at Twitter.

Objects in Kubernetes

Monikinderjit Singh — Sat, 28 May 2022 17:51:28 +0000

In the previous article, you learnt about Kubernetes and its architecture. If not, I recommend going through it: Getting Started: Kubernetes.

In this article, you will go deeper about Kubernetes objects.

Objects in Kubernetes

Pods: Pods are atomic element within a cluster which provides the exceution environment for an application. A pod generally represents one or more containers that should be controlled as single application. Every pod has a container within it, that excutes an application from a docker image.
Replication Controller: Replication controller is an object that defines a pod template and control parameters to scale identical replicas of a pod horizontally by increasing or decreasing the number of running copies. It maintains the number of pods to be created according to the number of pods defined in configuration files. If the number of replicas in a controllers' configuration changes, it starts up or kills containers.
Replication Sets: They are an iteration of replication controller design with better capability of flexibility.
Deployments: Deployments are sets of identical pods. They use replication sets as a building block. They are high level object designed to ease the lifecycle management of replicated pods. Deployments can be modified easily changing the configuration.
Stateful Sets: These are specialised pod controller which are known for providing unique addresses to pods. This enables Kubernetes to track pods.
Daemon Sets: A specialised pod controller which runs copy of pods on each node in the cluster. Most useful when deployment nodes perform maintenance and provides services themselves.
Jobs and Cron Jobs: Kubernetes uses a workload called jobs to provide a more task based workflow where the running container are expected to exit successfully after some time once they have completed their work. If you need to perform one-off or batch processing instead of running a continuous service, jobs is the one required. Whereas, Cron jobs in kubernetes provide an interface to run jobs with scheduling component. Cron jobs can be used to schedule a job to exceute in the future,reoccuring basis.
Services: A service is a component that acts as a basic internal load balancer for pods. It provides API endpoints with a stable IP address that allows applications to discover pods running a particular application.

Getting Started: Kubernetes

Monikinderjit Singh — Fri, 27 May 2022 09:08:53 +0000

Have you ever thought how engineers are scaling there hosted softwares? What tools are they using and is that too difficult to scale? And many more questions you might get into your head if interested in Software Scaling and cloud computing.

Kubernetes is the tool which help engineers answer these questions. Let's dive into it.

What exactly is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is a powerful open source system, developed by Google, which helps you to manage containerized applications. It is a platform generally which provides complete management of application(containerized applications) and services and provides methods for scalability, availabilty and reliability.

With Kubernetes, you can easily scale your applications up or down, according to your needs, perform rolling updates and control traffic to your application network. All these features make Kubernetes a powerful too.

Hmm, you have understood the definition of Kubernetes, but how does kubernetes provide such powerful services? For this question to be answered, you have to learn about Kubernetes Architecture covered in next Section.

Secret to Power: Kubernetes Architecture

At the base of Kubernetes layered structured, all the individual machines, physical or virtual, are bought under a cluster which is connected to a shared network helping in communication between servers.
Roles are assigned to machines in the cluster
There are two components:
- Control Plane(constitutes of master nodes)
- Data Plane(constitutes of worker nodes)

Control Plane

This is the gateway and brain for the cluster. Exposing APIs, health check, scheduling and orchestration is handled by this.

The components of control plane are:

Kube-apiserver: Nucleus of the cluster. Allows user to configure Kubernetes' workloads and organizational units. Acts as bridge between various components.
kube-controller-manager: Handles controller processes. Ensures that the desired configuration is propagated to resources.
etcd: the key-value store, used for backs-up and keeping manifests for the entire cluster
kube-scheduler: the mechanism that places the new workloads on a node with sufficient satisfactory resource requirements
cloud-controller-manager: Act as glue that allows Kubernetes to update state information when information is gathered from the cloud provider, adjust cloud resources and create and use additional cloud services as required by the cluster.

Data Plane

The data plane consists of servers responsible for carrying out given work using local or external resources. The creation or deletion of nodes and setting up traffic rules as per instruction given by master nodes is handled by worker nodes.

The components of data plane are:

Kubelet: the agent that runs on every node and notifies the kube- apiserver that this node is part of the cluster
kube-proxy: a network proxy that ensures the reachability and accessibility of workloads places on this specific node
a container runtime: Each node must have a container runtime. Responsible for starting and managing containers.

This was all about kubernetes and its architecture. There is alot about Kubernetes which we will be covering in following articles.

I hope you liked my article. You can follow me on Twitter.

Whats' DevOps

Monikinderjit Singh — Thu, 26 May 2022 06:40:44 +0000

If you are quite active on social media, you might have heard about DevOps, cloud, docker and many more. And wondering what exactly going up there in the cloud :).

Voila, wait we will be going to understand each one of these in detail in the following articles.

In this article, you are going to start with dev ops.

So, what exactly is Dev Ops?

DevOps stands for Developer Operations. So it generally implies to be the combination of developer and operations. It is a practice which helps developer teams and operation teams to work together and provide software at greater velocity and better feedback.

It is a software engineering practice which focuses on providing teams with better communication and feedback mechanisms than agile and waterfall development.

DevOps Lifecycle

The devOps lifecycle contains an infinite loop of development and operations.

Devops icons created by SBTS2018 - Flaticon

Its lifecycle includes:

Planning: The team should adopt agile practices to increase speed and quality
Build
Continuous Integration and Delivery: Continuous Integrations help to release software at a faster pace with automated workflows.
Continuous Feedback: The developer and operation team should evaluate each release and improve the future releases/
Operate: This phase included monitoring, maintaining and troubleshooting applications in production environments.

Why DevOps?

Faster Production
Speed
Scalability
Collaboration
Improved Mean Time to recovery

So we have gone through the benefits of DevOps and why you should be using it. But as with other software development techniques, this type of planning may not be suitable for your workflow. Let's look at when you should refrain from using DevOps.

When not DevOps?

You should not prefer going for DevOps workflow if you are either having irregular software releases or your software is currently a legacy one or the old architecture is still being used.

I hope you liked this article about a brief intro to DevOps. You can follow me on Twitter.