At Banzai Cloud we write Kubernetes tools that, no surprise, require other tools to get installed. These tools handle resource lifecycle operations like the installation, upgrade, and removal of various components that need to be integrated together. Kubernetes Operators solve all these and even more for a given application’s domain, but if the focus is simply on installation, upgrade and removal of a set of components - which are in our case operators themselves (operating operators), then we need a tool with different characteristics at hand.

It’s been some time since we open sourced our Koperator , an operator designed from square one to take advantage of the full potential of Kafka on Kubernetes, and have built Supertubes on top to manage Kafka for our customers. One of the most requested enterprise feature has been the implementation of rolling upgrades. Built on the Banzai Cloud’s Koperator , Supertubes adds support and orchestrates these upgrades. Accordingly, in today’s blog we’re going to take a deep dive into the technical details of how the operator handles an update and how you can use Supertubes to seamlessly upgrade to the newest 2.

From the beginning, Bank-Vaults has been one of the core building blocks of Pipeline - Banzai Cloud’s container management platform for hybrid clouds. Today we are happy to announce the release of Bank-Vaults 1.0. Additionally, we have taken the step of adding Bank-Vaults support for hardware security modules, usually abbreviated as HSMs. Bank-Vaults 1.0 Bank-Vaults was first released two years ago as a Vault operator for Kubernetes, a CLI tool and a Go library.

At Banzai Cloud we support and manage hybrid Kubernetes clusters for our customers across five clouds and on-prem (bare metal, VMware). Therefore, the ability and fluency required to observe these clusters is an absolute must. Very frequently, the Pipeline control plane is tasked with managing multiple Kubernetes clusters, which it does through our own CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution, PKE, or a cloud provider-managed distribution. When that happens, it’s important that we federate metrics, collect them into a single place for querying, analysis and long term storage.

In Kubernetes clusters, the number of Operators and their managed CRDs is constantly increasing. As the complexity of these systems grows, so does the demand for competent user interfaces and flexible APIs. At Banzai Cloud we write lots of operators (e.g. Vault, Istio, Logging, Kafka, HPA, etc) and we believe that whatever system you’re working with, whether it’s a service mesh, a distributed logging system or a centralized message broker operated through CRDs, you will eventually find yourself in need of enhanced observability and more flexible management capabilities.

One of the exciting new features of Istio 1.4 is automatic mutual TLS support, which brings some long awaited convenience to Istio users configuring mTLS for their applications. In this post, we’ll be introducing the concept of Istio’s auto mTLS feature and demonstrating how it works using a demo application. Today, we’ll be using our open-source Banzai Cloud Istio Operator and our multi and hybrid-cloud enabled service mesh platform, Backyards (now Cisco Service Mesh Manager), to install Istio 1.

UPDATE: For a newer Istio control plane upgrade method using the canary upgrade flow see the Safe and sound canary upgrade for your Istio control plane post. Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about.

Our thinking that there was a hunger for an operator that makes easy the provisioning and operating Apache Kafka clusters on Kubernetes which is not based on Kubernetes stateful sets, proved to be correct as shortly after we released the first version our open-source Koperator a community started to build around it. We received lots of valuable feedback that helps to shape the future of the Koperator and also feature contributions from the community.

UPDATE: For a newer Istio control plane upgrade method using the canary upgrade flow see the Safe and sound canary upgrade for your Istio control plane post. Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. Many organizations are embracing a more decentralized decision making process, allowing them to better build cloud native applications, and to deliver them more rapidly and safely.

UPDATE: For a newer Istio control plane upgrade method using the canary upgrade flow see the Safe and sound canary upgrade for your Istio control plane post. Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about.

If you’re reading this post, you’re likely already familiar with our container management platform, Pipeline, and our CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution, PKE: you probably already know how we make it possible to spin up clusters across several cloud providers and on-premise, in multi-cloud but also hybrid-cloud environments. But whether these are single or multi-cluster topologies, resilience is key. We at Banzai Cloud believe this is the case not just for infrastructural components but for entire managed application environments, like Apache Kafka.

At Banzai Cloud we work on a multi- and hybrid-cloud container management platform, Pipeline. As a result, we’ve opensourced quite a few Kubernetes operators. While writing some of the more complex operators, such as those for Istio, Vault or Koperator , we were faced with lots of unnecessary Kubernetes object updates. These updates are a byproduct of the fact that operators are typically used to manage a large number of resources.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. In the last few months we wrote a lot of different blog posts about the Istio service mesh.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. Service mesh probably needs no introduction. But, just to recap, let’s define it as a highly configurable, dedicated and low‑latency infrastructure layer designed to handle and provide reliable service-to-service communication, implemented as lightweight network proxies deployed alongside application code.

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?

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. One of the core features of the Istio service mesh is the observability of network traffic.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. Hybrid- and multi-cloud are quickly becoming the new norm for enterprises, just as service mesh is becoming essential to the cloud native computing environment.

UPDATE: For a newer Istio control plane upgrade method using the canary upgrade flow see the Safe and sound canary upgrade for your Istio control plane post. Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about.

Two weeks ago we introduced our Kafka Spotguide for Kubernetes - the easiest way to deploy and operate Apache Kafka on Kubernetes. Since then, it’s been integrated into our application and DevOps container management platform, Pipeline, among other spotguides such as Spark on Kubernetes, Zeppelin, NodeJS and Golang, just to name a few. Because we’ve already met our goal of making it easy set up a Kafka cluster on Kubernetes with just few clicks, and in less than ten minutes - provisioning and operating its entire infrastructure, both in Kubernetes and Kafka - we’ve shifted our focus to Kafka security.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. At Banzai Cloud we are building a feature rich enterprise-grade application and devops container management platform, called Pipeline and a CNCF certified Kubernetes distribution, PKE.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. Two weeks ago we announced the first release of our Istio operator. Since then we’ve added support for Istio’s preliminary 1.

One of the key features of the Pipeline platform is its ability to automatically provision, manage, and operate different application frameworks through what we call spotguides. Among the many spotguides we support on Kubernetes (Spark, Zeppelin, NodeJS, Golang, even custom frameworks - to name a few) Apache Kafka is among the most popular. We are heavily invested in making it as easy and straightforward as possible to operate Apache Kafka automatically on Kubernetes, and we believe that our current Apache Kafka Spotguide does just that.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. Last week we released our open source Istio operator designed to help ease the sometimes difficult task of managing Istio.

Check out Backyards in action on your own clusters! Register for a free version Want to know more? Get in touch with us, or delve into the details of the latest release. Or just take a look at some of the Istio features that Backyards automates and simplifies for you, and which we’ve already blogged about. Service mesh has, without question, been one of the most vigorously debated and obsessed over topics of discussion in recent memory.

If you are looking to try out an automated way to provision and manage Kafka on Kubernetes, please follow this Kafka on Kubernetes the easy way link. At Banzai Cloud we use Kafka internally a lot. We have some internal systems and customer reporting deployments where we rely heavily on Kafka deployed to Kubernetes. We practice what we preach and all these deployments (not just the external ones) are done using our application platform, Pipeline.