Companies providing services for government, healthcare, or finance sectors must ensure that their products adhere to government approved security requirements that ensure the protection of sensitive data. The Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) outlines the rules for cryptographic modules employed as mechanism that implement security. A cryptographic module is a combination of hardware and/or software that handles cryptographic functions such as encryption, decryption, digital signatures, authentication techniques and random number generation.

A few days ago we published a blog post about how to use Apache Kafka’s proprietary authentication and authorization (ACL) with Kubernetes Service Accounts via Supertubes. If you skimmed that post or have actually used it with Supertubes, you might think that this is (as Shakespeare put it) much ado about nothing, as things just work out-of-the-box. As the CTO of Banzai Cloud, and someone involved in the details of our product development, I can confirm that this has been our single biggest engineering push of 2020 so far (spoiler alert - that record won’t last long: there are three or four parallel efforts already challenging it).

It’s no news that for quite a while our Apache Kafka on Kubernetes take, Supertubes has been happily running inside an Istio-based service mesh, in both single or multi-cluster setups across hybrid clouds. While we have touched on several aspects of the advantages Istio gave us, this post’s aim is to collect some of the issues, cornerstones and benefits. We see the service mesh as a key component of every modern Cloud Native stack.

There has been a lot of talk about multi- and hybrid-clouds over the past years. Some cloud vendors see these trends as a threat, others look at them as an opportunity. We think that beneath the buzzwords lie some very important use-cases driven by the needs of enterprises and SaaS providers. However, delivering and operating multi- and hybrid-clouds has been too complex for most organizations so far. One major area of focus for Banzai Cloud has been hybrid clouds, to create and automate a seamless and consistent operational experience for a concept that has a lot of underlying complexities.

Two weeks ago we announced, the tech preview for Banzai Cloud Pipeline 2.0, the hybrid any-cloud platform. That new platform allows customers to build hybrid Kubernetes clusters in four different ways, across 5 cloud providers and on-premise datacenters and introduces a new acronym: BYOK, Bring your own Kubernetes! Day 2 operations Kubernetes has changed how workloads are run by providing a convenient abstraction layer over infrastructure. While many of our customers use Pipeline to create all their clusters, and want to kickstart their Day 0 and Day 1 experiences, others want to reuse the clusters that they have already deployed.

With KubeCon North America 2019 drawing near, we are excited to share the latest developments from Banzai Cloud. Stop by our booth SE74 to see what exciting new products Banzai Cloud brings into the fold. Don’t miss the opportunity to connect with our team, register for 1:1 sessions, and experience the magic of Hungarian pálinka (it will be under the table, code word: pah-lyn-kah). Join us for a taste! BOOK A MEETING

We are delighted to announce our tech preview of Banzai Cloud Pipeline 2.0, the hybrid any-cloud platform. A little under a year ago we released the first commercial version of Banzai Cloud Pipeline and made it available for development and PoCs by launching our Try Pipeline initiative. Banzai Cloud Pipeline 1.0 was the first incarnation of our vision for a productive and flexible multi-cloud container management platform (now supporting five public clouds and on-prem datacenters).

Yes, we opensourced yet another Kubernetes operator for Apache Kafka. This might seem bizarre, considering the alternatives that are already available (they exist but there are not too many), so you may be wondering, ‘Why?’ Well, keep reading and we’ll tell you: from design gaps and features we believe are necessary to operate Kafka on K8s, through my personal fix for Envoy, to some of our specific usage scenarios. tl;dr So to return to our initial question, ‘Why?

There has been a lot of talk about multi- and hybrid-cloud deployments over the past years. Some cloud vendors see these trends as a threat, others look at them as an opportunity. We think that beneath the buzzwords lie some very important use-cases driven by the needs of enterprises and SaaS providers. However, delivering and operating multi- and hybrid-clouds had been too complex for most organizations so far. The use-cases that we’ve seen at customers broadly relate to three main areas: flexibility, cost optimization, and compliance.

Banzai Cloud is proud to announce that our open source Pipeline Kubernetes Engine is now a CNCF Certified Kubernetes Distribution! PKE is an extremely simple Kubernetes installer and distribution, designed to work anywhere, and is the preferred run-time of Banzai Cloud’s cloud native application and devops container management platform, Pipeline. Banzai Cloud Pipeline supercharges the development, deployment and scaling of container-based applications with native support for multi-, hybrid-, and edge-cloud environments.

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you may have already seen a “short” description of what our platform does. It usually goes something like this: Banzai Cloud Pipeline is a solution-oriented application platform which allows enterprises to develop, deploy and securely scale container-based applications in multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. We frequently elaborate on this by providing a list of key features: Banzai Cloud Pipeline leverages best-of-breed cloud components, such as Kubernetes and adds a unified system architecture that enables a highly productive, yet flexible environment for developers and operations teams alike.

We will be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Seattle this week experiencing the magic and catching up with people from the broader community. This will be a special event for us as we will be launching the first public beta of our Banzai Cloud Pipeline platform. Let us know if you’d like to chat! Get in touch thru Twitter or LinkedIn. See you there!

Admission webhook series: In-depth introduction to Kubernetes admission webhooks Detecting and blocking vulnerable containers in Kubernetes (deployments) Controlling the scheduling of pods on spot instance clusters Banzai Cloud’s Pipeline platform uses a number of Kubernetes webhooks to provide several advanced features, such as spot instance scheduling, vulnerability scans and some advanced security features (to bypass K8s secrets - more to come next week). The Pipeline webhooks are all open source and available on our GitHub:

Banzai Cloud announced today that it is collaborating with Oracle to bring its feature-rich application platform to Oracle Kubernetes Engine users. Banzai Cloud’s Pipeline deployment automation and execution engine enables developers to go from commit to scale in minutes by automating all the underlying tasks that provide convenient CI/CD flows, robust security, analytics and the ability to scale. The technology not only provides significant productivity gains to developers, but also increases operational efficiencies by aiding instance selection and automated introspection of large-scale workloads.

At Banzai Cloud we are building a feature rich enterprise-grade application platform, built for containers on top of Kubernetes, called Pipeline. We have always been committed to supporting Kubernetes and our container based application platform on all major providers, however, we are also committed to making portability between cloud vendors easy, seamless and automated. Accordingly, this post will highlight a few important aspects of a multi-cloud approach we learned from our users, and the open source code we developed and made part of the Pipeline platform.

At Banzai Cloud we are building a feature rich enterprise-grade application platform, built for containers on top of Kubernetes, called Pipeline. Security is one of our main areas of focus, and we strive to automate and enable those security patterns we consider essential, including tier zero features for all enterprises using the Pipeline Platform. We’ve blogged about how to handle security scenarios on several of our previous posts. This time we’d like to focus on a different aspect of securing Kubernetes deployments:

We are excited to announce that Banzai Cloud has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation! The CNCF and The Linux Foundation are expending extraordinary effort in helping to standardize open source technologies that enable the development, deployment, management and operation of next generation Cloud Native software stacks. Our mission is to bring Cloud Native to enterprises and with this announcement, we strive to help push container and cloud native technology standardization and interoperability forward.

One of our goals with Pipeline is to support Java and Java Enterprise Edition deployments, allowing developers to iterate fast while building and deploying safe, and also pushing code to production. In order to do that, we place a lot of importance on different aspects of a Java/JEE application’s lifecycle - we allow engineers: To continuously integrate and deploy their Java apps to Kubernetes To deploy Java Enterprise Edition applications to Kubernetes Once the Java containers are deployed to K8s, to avoid OOMKills To correctly size Java containers And, once deployments are done and sized, to monitor them without any code modification Enter Infinispan - a distributed cache and data grid.

Banzai Cloud announced today that it will collaborate with Red Hat in an effort to help standardize the management of complex stateful applications on Kubernetes. Simultaneously, Red Hat announced the Operator Framework, an open source toolkit designed to manage application instances on Kubernetes in a more effective, automated, and scalable way. Banzai Cloud will work collaboratively with Red Hat on this open source project, which will focus on the creation of a new Software Development Kit (SDK) for the “operators” pattern.

This week KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Copenhagen will bring together over 4000+ developers, architects and other members of the cloud native and open source communities under one roof. We at BanzaiCloud are part of these communities, as well as the CNCF landscape since we’re certified experts in these technologies and operating under the umbrella of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, so we can’t wait. Join us to learn about Kubernetes and its related technologies directly from industry experts.

We are excited to announce that Banzai Cloud is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP). The KCSP program was started by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in collaboration with the Linux Foundation and represents a milestone in the wide-spread adoption of a cloud native platform. It provides a strict set of rules and a battery of certified experts that guarantee only experienced partners be admitted to the program. This fosters trust, so enterprises can rely on Banzai Cloud and our flagship PaaS, Pipeline, to bring to bear the experience necessary to guide them on their Kubernetes and microservices journey to cloud native application platforms and production usage.

In the past few weeks we’ve been blogging about the advanced, enterprise-grade security features we are building into our open source PaaS, Pipeline. If you’d like to review these features, please read this series: Security series: Authentication and authorization of Pipeline users with OAuth2 and Vault Dynamic credentials with Vault using Kubernetes Service Accounts Dynamic SSH with Vault and Pipeline Secure Kubernetes Deployments with Vault and Pipeline Policy enforcement on K8s with Pipeline The Vault swiss-army knife The Banzai Cloud Vault Operator Vault unseal flow with KMS Kubernetes secret management with Pipeline Container vulnerability scans with Pipeline Kubernetes API proxy with Pipeline

For some time we’ve been evangelizing the idea that the runtime fabric of big data workloads should be Kubernetes. In this post I’d like to walk through the thought process behind that change and discuss its benefits. Obliviously, this is a pretty large topic, and this post has no intention of covering it completely - also, it reflects the views and opinions that we at Banzai Cloud believe in and push others to adopt.

Monitoring series: Monitoring Apache Spark with Prometheus Monitoring multiple federated clusters with Prometheus - the secure way Application monitoring with Prometheus and Pipeline Building a cloud cost management system on top of Prometheus Monitoring Spark with Prometheus, reloaded At Banzai Cloud we deploy large distributed applications to Kubernetes clusters that we also operate. We don’t enjoy waking up to PagerDuty notifications in the middle of the night, so we try to get ahead of problems by operating these clusters as efficiently as possible.

Banzai Pipeline, or simply “Pipeline” is a tabletop reef break located in Hawaii, on Oahu’s North Shore. It is the most famous and infamous reef on the planet, and serves as the benchmark by which all other surf breaks are measured. Pipeline is a PaaS with a built in CI/CD engine to deploy cloud native microservices to a public cloud or on-premise. It simplifies and abstracts all the details of provisioning cloud infrastructure, installing or reusing a Kubernetes cluster, and deploying an application.

Security series: Authentication and authorization of Pipeline users with OAuth2 and Vault Dynamic credentials with Vault using Kubernetes Service Accounts Dynamic SSH with Vault and Pipeline Secure Kubernetes Deployments with Vault and Pipeline Policy enforcement on K8s with Pipeline The Vault swiss-army knife The Banzai Cloud Vault Operator Vault unseal flow with KMS Kubernetes secret management with Pipeline Container vulnerability scans with Pipeline Kubernetes API proxy with Pipeline

At Banzai Cloud we provision different applications or frameworks to Pipeline, the PaaS we built on Kubernetes. We practice what we preach, and our PaaS’ control plane also runs on Kubernetes and requires a layer of data storage. It was therefore necessary that we explore two different use cases: how to deploy and to run a distributed, scalable and fully SQL compliant DB to cover our client’s, and our own, internal needs.

As 2017 comes to an end, we’re looking back at the three blog posts that were most popular with our readers. We can’t go too far back (though we’ve had 13 posts and one release already), since we founded our startup just a little over one month ago (on November 20, 2017, to be precise), but during this short period we’ve achieved a whole lot, and laid the foundation for some exciting new projects we plan to ship out early next year.

Banzai Pipeline, or simply Pipeline, is a tabletop reef break located in Hawaii, on Oahu’s North Shore. It is the most famous and infamous reef on the planet, and serves as the benchmark by which all other waves are measured. Pipeline is a PaaS with a built in CI/CD engine to deploy cloud native microservices to a public cloud or on-premise. It simplifies and abstracts all the details of provisioning cloud infrastructure, installing or reusing a Kubernetes cluster and deploying an application.

This week KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, North America is bringing together over 2500+ developers, architects and members of the cloud native open source communities. We’ve become an active member of this community by contributing and using the technologies that run under the umbrella of the Cloud Naticve Computing Foundation, so there’s no way we’re going to miss it. Join us, and learn about Kubernetes and its related technologies directly from industry experts.

Apache Spark on Kubernetes series: Introduction to Spark on Kubernetes Scaling Spark made simple on Kubernetes The anatomy of Spark applications on Kubernetes Monitoring Apache Spark with Prometheus Spark History Server on Kubernetes Spark scheduling on Kubernetes demystified Spark Streaming Checkpointing on Kubernetes Deep dive into monitoring Spark and Zeppelin with Prometheus Apache Spark application resilience on Kubernetes Apache Zeppelin on Kubernetes series: Running Zeppelin Spark notebooks on Kubernetes Running Zeppelin Spark notebooks on Kubernetes - deep dive

I had no intention of making or joining a new startup (after a successful exit that was a good financial decision but turned out to be terrible professional one), when a few former co-founders of SequenceIQ and friends that I’d been working with at Fathom Technology/Epam Systems approached me after I arrived home from an extended surfing trip. A handful of them had moved on to a project for a banking giant that invovled microservice-based Java applications scheduled with Nomad.