KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 kicks off next week (October 24-28 in Detroit), so we’ve been thinking a lot about how service catalogs can help you get the most out of your Kubernetes clusters!
As a container orchestration software, Kubernetes (k8s) reduces overhead for developers by managing the scheduling, load balancing, and distribution for hundreds to thousands of containers and clusters, simplifying the deployment of microservices and other components. It offers engineers a single venue for establishing how they’ll deploy services and how components should communicate. This kind of standardization improves the scalability and resiliency of applications, and makes life easier for developers, engineers, and site reliability teams.
It’s important to have a central place to define best practices and track key metadata about your services, especially as you enable your teams to become more autonomous when developing and safely deploying their applications. You’ll want to have a centralized, structured metadata store to track where and what has been deployed, and who owns relevant components. Although you can utilize things like OPA in k8s to define basic standards, you don’t want to aggressively block teams from deploying to production. Instead, you want to provide teams with visibility into those standards and nudge teams to adopt best practices.
A service catalog audits everything that exists in your environment, giving you all the information you need: what’s out there, what it means, who owns it, and what it does. Without a catalog, someone could deploy a critical service without you ever knowing — or at least, without you knowing until it’s too late to avoid an incident. In addition to a service catalog, you want to employ a combination of scorecarding, and OPA policies. These tools will provide the visibility you need so you’re not in the dark when your team members are rapidly deploying new services to your clusters.
Gain visibility with Kubernetes + Cortex
Cortex’s integration with Kubernetes provides you with deep visibility into your microservices architecture and how your services are deployed in real time. With our powerful service catalog, you can import services from multiple k8s clusters with one click. Once services are imported, you can easily view information about active replicas, currently deployed versions, resource requirements, and more.
To enforce best practices, you can build scorecard rules on top of the metadata that exists within your catalog. Scorecards will evaluate the custom rules you’ve set, like whether services are running on the latest k8s version or if they’re using version control, making it easy to see which services are meeting the standards set by your organization. Scorecards will also tell developers what rules they aren’t passing and provide guidance on how to address the problem, empowering them to independently improve services and produce high-quality code.
By integrating your Kubernetes clusters with Cortex, you can get the most out of k8s usage without the headaches of service complexity.
Catch us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022
We’re super excited to be a sponsor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022. K8s has become the industry standard for organizations running containerized microservice architectures, and by using Cortex, you can easily establish best practices around Kubernetes adoption at your organization.
Cortex is also proud to be a sponsor for BackstageCon, a one-day event taking place within KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.
Come meet folks from our team and our co-founders Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta at Booth #SU18 October 26th through 28th! Stop by for free stickers, t-shirts, and a live demo of Cortex, so you can see for yourself how Cortex helps developers gain more visibility and insight into all of their services and resources. All booth visitors will receive a raffle ticket for a chance to win an iPad Pro!
Be sure to RSVP for the after-party we’re co-hosting with Komodor, ARMO, and Finout on October 27th. Join us for drinks, bites, and a chance to network with fellow KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America attendees.
To learn more about Cortex and how we can help you make the most of your Kubernetes cluster, make sure to subscribe to our blog and follow us on Twitter.
