Traditional approaches to creating and maintaining workloads in the enterprise often include contributions from many teams and individuals. They also include a combination of manual and scripted activities. I sometimes refer to this as an assembly line. The workloads that come off the assembly line, like cars, have odometers and require regular maintenance. Others refer to these workloads as pets. When moving workloads to the cloud, it’s helpful to visualize how this typically happens on premise and how it will change when going into cloud. The illustration above shows the traditional approach in......
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UPDATE: Beginning in June, 2020, GKE will charge for the control plane. This means the design below will jump from $5/month to nearly $80/month. I was recently inspired by a post claiming it was possible to run kubernetes on Google for $5 per month. One reason I have been shy to jump all in with kubernetes is the cost of running a cluster for development work and later for production. After going through the post above, I realized that I could actually afford double that amount and end up with a very usable......
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One of the most significant enablers of IT and software automation has been the shift away from fixed infrastructure to flexible infrastructure. Virtualization, process isolation, resource sharing and other forms of flexible infrastructure have been in use for many decades in IT systems. It can be seen in early Unix systems, Java application servers and even in common tools such as Apache and IIS in the form of virtual hosts. If flexible infrastructure has been a part of technology practice for so long, why is it getting so much buzz now? Infrastructure as......
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