Over the last few years, Kubernetes has revolutionized the world of infrastructure and application distribution. From bare-metal servers to virtual machines to containers, Kubernetes has compelled teams to re-evaluate their entire technology stack – in the very best way possible. However, for many teams, Kubernetes is seen as a tall mountain to climb. But it doesn’t have to be.

You can perform no-code deployments of Rancher Kubernetes on the AWS GovCloud!

While the federal government and U.S. military are innovative in many ways, they don’t like to live on the edge when it comes to information technology. Stable, reliable, and secure are the name of the game. But in order to support the most advanced technology, such as next-gen warfare and highly complex supply chains, agencies need the power of edge computing with more choices that go beyond proprietary vertical stacks and standard Amazon Web Services (AWS). Edge computing eliminates the dependencies of on-premise infrastructure and decouples devices in any form from the data center, providing powerful, always available computing wherever the user is—from our communities to our borders to the battlefield.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully implemented your containerization strategy and automated your application deployment with Kubernetes. Whether you have a private or public cloud, you are still at risk for threats to your virtualized environment, including:

Throughout my career there has always been a disconnect between the documentation and the practical implementation. The Kubernetes (k8s) ecosystem is no stranger to this problem. This guide is a simple approach to installing Kubernetes and some REALLY useful tools. We will walk through installing all the following.

Monitoring and gathering metrics on your systems is an essential part of the lifecycle of any machine, application, or cluster. It provides us with the insight needed to be more proactive and less reactive to what our systems are doing. Gathering and viewing numerical data, like CPU load or memory usage, is something that is done with ease and looks great in a graph, but what about the massive amounts of log data out there? Historically, this was not something that you could easily put into a graph and it’s not always easily correlated with other events.

To the uninitiated, Kubernetes does a fairly simple thing: it provides the scaffolding to effortlessly run applications with very complex architectures. Rancher has built on top of this scaffolding, making it easy not only to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters but also applications. With Kubernetes, a lot of established paradigms of software development are evolving, oftentimes forcing many structural changes for the organizations. Things that many IT and procurement departments started to take for granted with the adoption of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), like cost allocation, get a new meaning and new complexity with Kubernetes.