Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. 

The name Kubernetes originates from Greek, meaning helmsman or pilot. Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014. Kubernetes combines over 15 years of Google’s experience running production workloads at scale with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.

Kubernetes (commonly stylized as k8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. It was originally designed by Google and is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It aims to provide a “platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts”. It works with a range of container tools, including Docker.

How does Kubernetes work?

A working Kubernetes deployment is called a cluster. You can visualize a Kubernetes cluster as two parts: the control plane, which consists of the master node or nodes, and the compute machines or worker nodes.

Worker nodes run pods, which are made up of containers. Each node is its own Linux environment and could be either a physical or virtual machine.

The master node is responsible for maintaining the desired state of the cluster, such as which applications are running and which container images they use. Worker nodes actually run the applications and workloads.

Kubernetes runs on top of an operating system and interacts with pods of containers running on the nodes.

The Kubernetes master node takes the commands from an administrator (or DevOps team) and relays those instructions to the subservient nodes.

This handoff works with a multitude of services to automatically decide which node is best suited for the task. It then allocates resources and assigns the pods in that node to fulfill the requested work.

The desired state of a Kubernetes cluster defines which applications or other workloads should be running, along with which images they use, which resources should be made available to them, and other such configuration details.

From an infrastructure point of view, there is little change to how you manage containers. Your control over containers just happens at a higher level, giving you better control without the need to micromanage each separate container or node.

Some work is necessary, but it’s mostly a matter of assigning a Kubernetes master, defining nodes, and defining pods.

Where you run Kubernetes is up to you. This can be on bare metal servers, virtual machines, public cloud providers, private clouds, and hybrid cloud environments. One of Kubernetes’ key advantages is it works on many different kinds of infrastructure.

Why you need Kubernetes and what it can do

Containers are a good way to bundle and run your applications. In a production environment, you need to manage the containers that run the applications and ensure that there is no downtime. For example, if a container goes down, another container needs to start. Wouldn’t it be easier if this behavior was handled by a system?

That’s how Kubernetes comes to the rescue! Kubernetes provides you with a framework to run distributed systems resiliently. It takes care of scaling and failover for your application, provides deployment patterns, and more. For example, Kubernetes can easily manage a canary deployment for your system.

Kubernetes provides you with:

• Service discovery and load balancing: Kubernetes can expose a container using the DNS name or using its own IP address. If traffic to a container is high, Kubernetes is able to load balance and distribute the network traffic so that the deployment is stable.
• Storage orchestration: Kubernetes allows you to automatically mount a storage system of your choice, such as local storages, public cloud providers, and more.
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks: You can describe the desired state for your deployed containers using Kubernetes, and it can change the actual state to the desired state at a controlled rate. For example, you can automate Kubernetes to create new containers for your deployment, remove existing containers, and adopt all their resources to the new container.
• Automatic bin packing: You provide Kubernetes with a cluster of nodes that it can use to run containerized tasks. You tell Kubernetes how much CPU and memory (RAM) each container needs. Kubernetes can fit containers onto your nodes to make the best use of your resources.
• Self-healing: Kubernetes restarts containers that fail, replaces containers, kills containers that don’t respond to your user-defined health check, and doesn’t advertise them to clients until they are ready to serve.
• Secret and configuration management: Kubernetes lets you store and manage sensitive information, such as passwords, OAuth tokens, and SSH keys. You can deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your container images, and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.

Can you run Kubernetes in a Dedicated server?

In short, yes, you can run a production-grade Kubernetes cluster in an environment like an on-premise data center or edge location by making a few tweaks. 

If you’re interested in testing Kubernetes in a bare-metal server, here’s a guide on how to do it.

Running your app on bare metal in the cloud introduces its own unique benefits that include cost, transparency, and performance. 

What does it mean to be “production-grade”?

• The installation is secure
• The deployment is managed with a repeatable and recorded process
• Performance is predictable and consistent
• Updates and configuration changes can be safely applied
• Logging and monitoring is in place to detect and diagnose failures and resource shortages
• Service is “highly available enough” considering available resources, including constraints on money, physical space, power, etc.
• A recovery process is available, documented, and tested for use in the event of failures

Production grade means anticipating accidents and preparing for recovery with minimal pain and delay. 

Sources:

What is Kubernetes? – Kubernetes – Out of the Clouds onto the Ground: How to Make Kubernetes Production Grade Anywhere – What is Kubernetes?

Cascade Lake (CSL/CLX) is Intel’s successor to Skylake, a 14 nm microarchitecture for enthusiasts and servers. In Intel’s Process-Architecture-Optimization model, Cascade Lake is an optimization of Skylake. Intel states that this will be their first microarchitecture to support 3D XPoint-based memory modules. 

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said the workplace chat company is now offering “free upgrades to paid plans” for teams working on coronavirus pandemic research, response, or mitigation.

That means any team working on a collaborative research, response, or mitigation to the coronavirus will get access to a paid plan for free. Slack has a free version of its product that anyone can download and start using, and then offers different levels of paid plans with more features. 

Interested teams can email a special address, [email protected], to get set up. Butterfield said teams can also email to set up a consultation on how best to get started with remote collaboration.

“We’ve done hundreds of upgrades and consultations already and have an incredibly helpful, speedy and energized team standing by. We’re grateful to be able to help where we can,” he tweeted on Monday. 

Butterfield’s comments come as more companies ask employees to work from home to try and mitigate the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and as a result, cloud software tools like Slack and videoconferencing tool Zoom are seeing a lot more interest and usage. On Monday, Zoom was the top free app on Apple’s App Store.

Last week during the company’s earnings call with analysts, Slack said it has been seeing a significant spike in new users for its free product amid the coronavirus outbreak. However, they said its too early to tell if that will impact business going forward. 

In general, analysts are expecting cloud software companies like Slack, Zoom, and Dropbox to do well where many other industries might not because people will be relying more on tools to stay connected and productive while working from home. 

Other companies are also offering resources to help those on the front lines of fighting the coronavirus. Verily, a subsidiary of Alphabet — Google’s parent company — is building a website designed to help people seeking testing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Salesforce is donating $1.5 million to the City of San Francisco to support its response to the coronavirus crisis and through its Health Cloud product, it will provide free access to its technology for emergency response teams, call centers, and care management teams for health systems affected by the coronavirus. 

Source

Although 2019 closed with good numbers, the server market is now facing the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus crisis.

The year 2019 ended with positive figures regarding the global server market, increasing revenues by 5.1% and shipments by 11.7%, according to Gartner, thus slightly improving the annual computation figures. However, compared to 2018, the numbers are less favorable as server shipments worldwide decreased by 3.1%, and server revenues decreased by 2.5% compared to the full year of 2018.

The impact of the coronavirus outbreak is expected to moderate expected growth.

“The market grew again with a very strong result in the fourth quarter, driven largely by the return of demand for hyperscalers,” said Adrian O’Connell, senior director of research at Gartner. “However, the prospects for the global server market in 2020 are subject to significant uncertainty.

The impact of the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) is expected to moderate expected growth. Although the demand is expected from the hyperscale segment to continue for the first half of the year, reactions from other buying organizations will vary. “

Dell EMC tops the list of vendors in the global server market based on Q4 2019 revenue, as, despite a 9.9% year-over-year decline, the company gained 17.3% of the market share, followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise with 15.4% of the market. IBM, for its part, experienced the highest growth in the quarter, with an increase of 28.6%.

Cloud service providers under review by COVID-19

Research companies Forrester and GlobalData assess the impact of the pandemic on cloud service providers.

With the COVID-19 virus putting more and more millions of people in the “work from home” category, cloud service providers are being tested. In response, global cloud leaders are testing their infrastructure and activating specific stress test procedures, research from Forrester indicates.

Both Forrester and another research company GlobalData have published evaluations of the impact of the health crisis on cloud services. Amazon web services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, have all planed for spikes in demand and pandemic response policies. 

In the past, most Cloud providers have suffered significant losses when received high peaks of demands, leaving users without service and lots of problems, like a considerable amount of downtime.

While the long-term impact of how people will work in the future is unclear, the pandemic offers a great case study and a first look at the benefits and disadvantages of cloud computing.

GlobalData believes that COVID-19 stimulates demand not only for cloud services but also for other IT solutions such as edge computing. 

Cloud infrastructure and service providers whose businesses depend on vulnerable industries affected by the economic toll could face great challenges due to the changes in user behavior and the global economic state.

As companies close their physical stores and, when they can, make the transition to telecommuting, it becomes clear how vital servers are to the continuity of operations. 

Dedicated servers

If you need flexibility on the back end, expect a high volume of traffic, want complete control over your server, plus the performance and security of your web hosting services are incredibly important to you, the most reliable option is dedicated hosting.

With companies like ServerPronto, you can have a dedicated server for as little as $49.95 a month alongside other great benefits like fast provisioning, 24/7/365 award-winning support and a fault-tolerant network that guarantees 100% SLA uptime.

ServerPronto offers the best affordable and secure hosting service in all dedicated server packages.

Cadence confirms that the first DDR5 memories will work at 4800 MHz, they will arrive this year

While JEDEC has not yet publicly released the final version of the DDR5 memory standard, major chipmakers already have access to their documents to begin manufacturing both the drivers and memory chips, and Cadence revealed some important details about this new standard.

The first information confirmed by Cadence is that the base specification will be 4800MHz, being the minimum frequency that we will see in these new reports. We will also see more frequent models, although the company did not specify what they would be.

Bandwidth

Other important information is that the main objective of the new standard is not bandwidth but capacity, so we will see conventional modules of up to 256GB with access to data in less than 100ns. Although there are currently 256GB modules, they use special technologies that are only supported on servers, and not by any conventional processor or motherboard.

Release date

The company also revealed that it is already taking orders for its first products that use this technology and that we will begin to see them on the market later this year, so there is very little left to take a first look at the DDR5 memories.

As much as we see the first products this year, on most conventional platforms, we won’t see DDR5 memories until next year. Both AMD and Intel plan to give support only in 2021, and even Samsung will start manufacturing its chips in 2021, so it takes a little more to see a massive use of this technology.

Remember when you were a kid and you were always told to share your things? fast-forward a couple of years (way more, if you’re like me…) and now you know it’s better to have some things entirely to yourself.

So it’s the case of hosting servers! Sure there are some who might still prefer shared hosting, but once you read this entry you’ll see how Dedicated Servers can make you and your users/visitors happier!

These are the top benefits of a Dedicated Server, explained in bite-size portions… because sometimes less is more -here we go!

1. No sharing! – Other websites won’t be hogging up the server’s resources, so you get all the power. 

2. Enhanced performance – you get maximum uptime for your website because server resources are exclusive to you.

3. Big traffic? No problem – your server bandwidth is only yours so bottleneck issues can stay in the past!

4. Stable and reliable – Dedicated servers provide more stability and reliability than shared hosting. Why? Because no one else is messing your server!  

5. Load in a flash – your server won’t slow down, as there are no other applications sharing your space and clogging up the server’s RAM and CPU. 

6. Happy visitors and SEO boost – your visitors and user can have your website or app load faster and you get an SEO boost for top speed and happy users!

A Kissmetrics report shows that 47% of consumers expect a page to load within two seconds. Performance is definitely something to give careful consideration to, as compromising your site’s speed does more than frustrate your visitors. It may impact your search performance as well.

7. Better security – With a dedicated server, you can also be sure that you aren’t sharing space with a malicious website or a potential spammer. 

8. Secure transactions – Dedicated hosting allows enhanced security, particularly important for companies handling sensitive transactions over FTP or SSL.

9. Unique IP address – this is especially important if you are running an e-commerce site that requires SSL for credit card processing.

10. No bad neighbors – with a dedicated server you don’t have to worry about your neighbors being spam sites or adult sites that could lower your websites’ rank.

11. Flexibility – you can easily customize your server to meet your RAM, disk space, CPU, and software needs.

12. Scalability – pretty much an extension of the last point. You can easily upgrade your server and scale at your own pace.

13. Tailored environment – a dedicated server allows organizations a customizable server environment that fits their needs.

14. A la carte platform – choose the platform and software you really need, allowing more control over how your dedicated server is configured.

15. An overall higher level of control – dedicated servers give you the ability to add all the applications and programs you want – rather than being stuck with your host’s default options. 

Bonus: No overhead for purchasing or maintaining equipment – renting a dedicated hosting is a low-cost way to access the resources of a full server!

The usual drawback

There are 2 sides to every coin and dedicate servers are no exception to the rule. Sites that deal with a lot of traffic, or have strict needs for customization and security, may find that a dedicated hosting provider is their best option.

All these advantages do come at a higher price than shared hosting, but with companies like ServerPronto, you can have a dedicated server for as little as $49.95 a month alongside other great benefits like fast provisioning, 24/7/365 award-winning support and a fault-tolerant network that guarantees 100% SLA uptime.

If you need flexibility on the back end, expect a high volume of traffic for your app or website, want complete control over your server, plus the performance and security of your web hosting services are incredibly important to you, consider dedicated hosting, as this option will let you customize settings in a way that you simply can’t with shared hosting.

ServerPronto offers the best affordable and secure hosting service in all dedicated server packages.

Sources: 

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