In our previous article (Container Orchestration, Kubernetes, and the CI/CD Pipeline), we discussed the features, benefits, and challenges of using Kubernetes (K8) to orchestrate your containers and application deployments. Kubernetes alone is a powerful framework, but relies entirely on proper configurations to achieve the desired results. Kubernetes facilitates the ability to automate the DevOps CI/CD pipeline but alone can be unwieldy.
But there is good news! You can use Opsera Continuous Orchestration and Kubernetes together to create a fully-managed Infrastructure-as-Code CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous deployment) pipelines for container-based applications.
This approach provides the best of the both worlds, taking advantage of Kubernetes’ open-source system to manage your containerized applications, while Opsera Toolchain Automation, Declarative Pipelines, and Unified Insights enable developers and engineers to build, secure, validate, and deploy applications using drag-and-drop tools and build a no-code pipeline in minutes.
As we discussed previously, a big advantage of Kubernetes framework is that anything that can be defined, can be automated. But this must all be built and configured before Kubernetes can take over stateful control. This can present a challenge for users, depending on their skills and knowledge of Kubernetes. For example, in order to automate code deployments, a load balancer must be configured. As well, a successful automation must contain security gates and quality checkpoints that halt the deployment and rollback if unmet.
Building this by hand in Kubernetes can be a daunting task, however Opsera’s orchestration tools make this go from challenging to straightforward. Across any cloud or hybrid platform, you can easily define your clusters, nodes, pods, and containers while implementing security groups and checks/scans using continuous orchestration and Terraform templates.
The continuous orchestration framework enables DevOps and Cloud engineers to add validation, thresholds, gates, approvals and add additional steps in the workflow without writing custom code. Thanks to Unified Insights, they can also see the activity logs across various steps in one “single pane of glass” console (including console logs) and get end to end visibility across the entire CI/CD pipeline.
As we previously discussed, many critical enterprise workloads are still running in VMs or on dedicated physical servers and can be difficult to migrate into containerized infrastructure due to operating system dependencies and lack of native container support.
However, using Opsera for Continuous Orchestration solution greatly simplifies the migration process of SDLC applications down to three easy steps:
The following CI/CD pipeline depicts the ways you can convert the VM images into Docker images and deploy them into Kubernetes clusters:
Leveraging Opsera Continuous Orchestration and declarative CI/CD pipelines enables DevOps and Cloud engineers to automatically take code from repository to production in a Kubernetes cluster with minimal user intervention. To achieve this, create a pipeline that will build and deploy committed code changes as long as they meet the security and quality thresholds and gates in the pipelines. Using the following steps, you can easily create a native K8 pipeline with security and quality gates without writing any custom code and also in just a matter of minutes.
With Opsera Continuous Orchestration, we help you manage your collection of DevOps tools, integrate them seamlessly with plug-and-play architecture, automate your workflows with drag-and-drop options, aggregate and contextualize logs to provide continuous insights across your entire DevOps environment.
Using drag-and-drop options, you can easily build the pipelines and workflows across various DevOps stages: code commit, software builds, security scans, vault integration, approvals, notifications, thresholds and gates, quality testing integrations, validation, integration with change control and monitoring tools, and deployment while maintaining insights and logs for each step along the way.
Kubernetes, while powerful and capable straight out of the box, is also complex and presents numerous challenges. With Opsera, there is a simple way to address and remove those barriers. Configurations are straightforward to design, logging is covered at every step and pulled into unified views, and security and quality are easy to gate check.
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