#Live Migration Management, Dancing with Serverless, GitOps, Cloud-Native
#4 Devops, Cloud Computing, Platform Engineering
RESEARCH PAPERS
A Taxonomy of Live Migration Management in Cloud Computing
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of live migration management in cloud and edge computing environments. Live migration, the process of moving a running service from one computing node to another with minimal disruption, is crucial for maintaining service quality in dynamic environments.
The article identifies a lack of existing surveys focused on live migration management and proposes a new taxonomy to categorize and analyze research in this area. This taxonomy covers several key aspects:
Performance and Cost Models: Assess the impact of live migration on system performance and the associated costs.
Migration Generations: Different generations of resource management algorithms used for live migration.
Migration Planning and Scheduling: Strategies for determining when and where to migrate services.
Migration Lifecycle Management: Managing the entire process of live migration, from initiation to completion.
By examining these aspects, the authors aim to provide a structured framework for understanding the challenges and opportunities in live migration management. They also identify research gaps and future directions to improve the performance and efficiency of live migration in cloud and edge computing.
TALKS
Dancing with Serverless • Peter Sbarski • YOW! 2022 - GOTO
Peter highlights the importance of serverless architecture and how it is a good option for quickly building and scaling applications. He mentioned several benefits and drawbacks. Also mentioned the step functions. He explained everything using a case study - A Cloud Guru.
TRENDS
GitOps
At its core, GitOps is a set of practices that leverage Git—the popular version control system—as the single source of truth for both your infrastructure and application code. This means that everything you need to run your system, from server configurations to application deployment specifications, is stored in a Git repository.
Key Principles of GitOps:
Declarative Configuration: Your infrastructure and application configurations are described in declarative files (e.g., YAML, JSON) stored in Git. This allows you to define the desired state of your system rather than imperative scripts that outline the steps to get there.
Version Control: Every change to your infrastructure or application is tracked in Git, providing a complete history of changes, making it easy to roll back to previous versions if needed.
Automated Reconciliation: A GitOps operator continuously monitors the state of your system and compares it to the desired state defined in Git. If there's a discrepancy, the operator automatically reconciles the system to match the Git state.
Pull-Based Deployments: Instead of pushing changes from your CI/CD pipeline to your environment, GitOps agents within your environment pull the latest changes from Git and apply them automatically.
Benefits of GitOps:
Improved Collaboration: Developers and operators can collaborate on infrastructure changes using the same familiar Git workflow they use for application code.
Increased Reliability: Automated reconciliation ensures that your system always matches the desired state, reducing the risk of configuration drift or manual errors.
Enhanced Auditability and Traceability: Git's version control system provides a detailed audit trail of all changes, making it easier to track and troubleshoot issues.
Faster and Safer Deployments: GitOps enables automated, pull-based deployments, reducing the risk of human error and allowing for faster, more frequent releases.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): GitOps naturally lends itself to IaC practices, making infrastructure management more reproducible and scalable.
Tools for GitOps:
Flux: A popular open-source GitOps operator for Kubernetes.
Argo CD: Another powerful open-source GitOps tool designed for Kubernetes.
Weaveworks GitOps: A commercial GitOps platform from the creators of Flux.
GitLab CI/CD: Includes features that support GitOps workflows.
Key Considerations:
Learning Curve: Adopting GitOps may require some upskilling for teams who are not familiar with Git or declarative configuration.
Security: Protecting your Git repository is crucial, as it becomes the single source of truth for your entire system.
Observability: Implementing robust monitoring and logging is essential to track the state of your system and detect any issues.
TOOLS, TECHNIQUES, PRACTISES
Backstage
Backstage Software Catalog and Developer Platform
Developed and open-sourced by Spotify, Backstage gained popularity due to its flexibility and extensibility.
Core Features:
Service Catalog: Centralized inventory of software services, their owners, documentation, and dependencies.
Software Templates: Standardized templates for creating new services, accelerating onboarding and enforcing best practices.
Plugins: A rich ecosystem of plugins allows you to customize and extend Backstage's functionality, integrating with CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, and more.
Strengths:
Open Source: Free to use and modify, with a large community of contributors.
Flexibility: Highly customizable to fit your organization's specific needs.
Extensibility: Wide range of plugins for integrating with various tools and systems.
Challenges:
Complexity: Requires significant effort to set up and maintain.
Learning Curve: Can be challenging to learn and master, especially for complex use cases.
Cloud-Native Development
Cloud-native development is a paradigm shift in how we design, build, and deploy applications. It's about creating software that's specifically designed to thrive in cloud environments, leveraging the unique benefits that cloud platforms offer.
Key Characteristics of Cloud-Native Applications:
Microservices Architecture: Breaking down monolithic applications into smaller, independent services that communicate via APIs. This allows for greater agility, scalability, and resilience.
Containerization: Packaging applications and their dependencies into lightweight, portable containers (like Docker). Containers provide consistency and ease of deployment across different environments.
Orchestration: Using tools like Kubernetes to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
DevOps Culture: Embracing a culture of collaboration between development, operations, and security teams to enable continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and faster time to market.
Cloud-Native Services: Leveraging managed cloud services (e.g., databases, messaging queues, storage) to reduce operational overhead and focus on core business logic.
Benefits of Cloud-Native Development:
Scalability: Cloud-native applications can scale horizontally (adding more instances) or vertically (adding more resources) to meet demand fluctuations.
Resilience: Microservices architecture and cloud infrastructure redundancy improve fault tolerance, ensuring applications can recover from failures gracefully.
Agility: Faster development cycles and the ability to release updates more frequently enable quicker responses to changing business needs.
Cost Efficiency: Cloud-native applications can optimize resource utilization, potentially reducing infrastructure costs.
Portability: Containerization allows for consistent deployment across different cloud providers or on-premises environments.
Innovation: Cloud-native development enables organizations to adopt new technologies and tools more easily, fostering innovation.
Challenges of Cloud-Native Development:
Complexity: Cloud-native architectures can be complex to design, manage, and troubleshoot.
Learning Curve: Adopting new tools and technologies like Kubernetes requires upskilling for developers and operations teams.
Security: Security becomes even more critical in distributed, cloud-native environments.
Monitoring and Observability: Ensuring visibility into the performance and health of microservices is crucial.
Cloud-Native Services:
Cloud providers offer a wide array of managed services that complement cloud-native development:
Compute: Serverless functions, container instances, virtual machines.
Storage: Object storage, block storage, file storage, databases (SQL, NoSQL).
Networking: Load balancers, virtual private clouds (VPCs), content delivery networks (CDNs).
Messaging and Queuing: Message queues, pub/sub systems.
Monitoring and Logging: CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Azure Monitor.
What is Cloud Native? - Cloud Native Applications Explained - AWS (amazon.com)