Ask Sendai

Implementing Continuous Delivery[1] at enterprise scale is a major challenge. As every company has to innovate their software delivery methods, we need to allow individual teams to learn and improve their own delivery pipeline. This is especially true in the Cloud Native world, where many best practices are still emerging. However, giving teams flexibility to experiment needs to be balanced with security and compliance requirements. In this post, I will explore how we successfully employed the GitOps architecture pattern to find a good balance between flexibility and security at a large enterprise customer of Container Solutions.

Grafana is the defacto dashboarding solution for time-series data. It supports over 40 datasources (as of this writing), and the dashboarding story has matured considerably with new features, including the addition of teams and folders. We now want to move on from being a dashboarding solution to being an observability platform, to be the go-to place when you need to debug systems on fire. Observability. There are a lot of definitions out there as to what that means.

Usually, when you’re a leader in an open-source community like Kubernetes and there’s a big event (like this week’s KubeCon North America), that means launching a brand new project. Launches are exciting, but maintaining a successful project like Kubernetes requires sustained investment and maintenance. We find that what really distinguishes a successful open-source project is the day-in day-out nurturing that happens behind the scenes. And it’s more than coding—it’s things like keeping the project safe and inclusive, writing documentation, managing test infrastructure, responding to issues, working in project governance, creating mentoring programs, reviewing pull requests, and participating in release teams.

Docker App is a new tool we spoke briefly about back at DockerCon US 2018. We’ve been working on docker-app to make container applications simpler to share and easier to manage across different teams and between different environments, and we open sourced it so you can already download Docker App from GitHub at https://github.com/docker/app. In talking to others about problems they’ve experienced sharing and collaborating on the broad area we call “applications” we came to a realisation: it’s a more general problem that others have been working on too.

As more organizations pursue cloud-native applications and infrastructures for creating modern software environments, it has become clear that there is no single solution in the market for defining and packaging these multi-service, multi-format distributed applications. Real-world applications can now span on-premises infrastructure and cloud-based services, requiring multiple tools like Terraform for the infrastructure, Helm charts and Docker Compose files for the applications, and CloudFormation or ARM templates for the cloud-services. Each of these need to be managed separately.