KuboOperate™ 

Businesses continue to move their workloads to the cloud. Some are content with simply making these workloads cloud enabled, removing the need to manage their own infrastructure. However, those moving to cloud native applications likely wish to take advantage of the inherent benefits that the cloud technologies provide such as auto-scaling, auto-provisioning and auto-resiliency.

Cloud and Solution Architects are often consulted and are responsible for making decisions on the trade-offs of various cloud designs, generally weighing costs associated with the benefits they derive from certain architectures.

KuboDesign™ is a web interface that facilitates and assists with the design and architecture of the cloud infrastructure and services required for deploying cloud native applications.

KuboDesign™ is designed to be used by Solutions & Cloud Architects to aid in their design at the outset of new cloud native projects. Based on several input criteria defining the requirements of the solution KuboDesign™ will provide an output of one or more architectures, for the supported cloud environments, complete with pricing estimates for budgeting purposes.

KuboDesign™ can be used to create and re-use design templates that can then be customized for future projects. It can also generate architecture documentation to reduce the time and effort required by a Cloud Architect.

One of the long poles in the proverbial software development project tent revolves around the procurement, provisioning and configuration of scalable just-in-time infrastructure, whether in private, public or hybrid cloud environments.

In our experience working with small companies to large enterprises, it is not uncommon to have development teams waiting weeks if not months for the readiness of hybrid cloud environments.

For cloud native applications the setup and configuration of container runtime, cloud native network & storage, data layer and orchestration and management adds further complexity, time and cost.

Incorporate all of the DevOps tooling and services, including code quality, security platforms, testing frameworks, API documentation, CI/CD pipelines, observability and analysis frameworks and it’s no wonder many project budgets spiral out of control, leaving business stakeholders questioning the cost of building and migrating workloads with a cloud native architecture.

KuboInfra™ has been built to help alleviate the pains associated with the delays and cost overruns experienced by the scenarios described above. KuboInfra™ does most of the heavy lifting required for the infrastructure, services & tooling setup of cloud native projects. More importantly, it completes this in a fraction of the time that it would take a team of DevSecOps engineers to accomplish manually.

Examples of the tasks KuboInfra™ performs to provision, bootstrap & configure fully functional hybrid cloud development environments supporting cloud native architectures, include:

• provision needed compute, network, storage & other cloud infrastructure services
• setup & configuration of container run-time  & orchestration management
• creation/integration with DevSecOps tools – e.g. CI/CD platforms, code quality & security platforms, test frameworks etc.
• bootstrap various tools/platforms within development environment aligning with industry better practices
• install & configure observability & analysis framework including monitoring, logging & tracing utilities
• verify the end-to-end automated development environment setup

We understand that many engineers love working with the command line and others like the simplicity of an easy to understand user interface. KuboAdmin™ is a web user interface to satisfy the needs of the latter group.

KuboAdmin™ allows for the creation, spin-up, tear-down and management of environments and new projects without the need for manipulating json, scripts and configuration files directly. The web user interface interacts with APIs exposed from KuboInfra™ in order to expedite the creation of new projects and environments. It will also provide users with a live status report on the availability of the services provisioned in each of their environments and the ability to manage and configure these services from within the UI.

KuboAdmin™ allows users to create environment templates for future use or to instantiate projects from reference architecture templates that already exist. The UI allows users to make configuration changes to all aspects of the environment or project that is configurable via KuboInfra™ or KuboCode™.

Changing to cloud native architectures necessarily adds complexity to many aspects of the overall solution. One of those aspects is handling the deployment and operations of a cloud native application, particularly when it comes to the topic of observability. The distributed nature of traffic flowing through multiple containers within a cluster, that are potentially here one minute and gone the next, makes it challenging to accurately see what is going on. Fortunately, there are several open source solutions within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that are built to handle distributed tracing, logging and monitoring very well. The difficulty here is that in order to get a complete view, you’re manipulating several user interfaces at one time to completely understand your environment and cloud native application.

KuboOperate™ is an intuitive user-friendly web interface meant for DevSecOps engineers to manage their cloud native application deployments. It handles three main types of activity:

• easy management of cloud native deployments, including traffic management using various strategies (e.g. Canary, Blue/Green or A/B Testing) and rollback services when needed
• a consolidated view of monitoring dashboards such as Kibana, APM, Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, Kiali and more) leveraging correlation or trace IDs to simplify an engineer’s ability to “follow” traffic across various systems and monitoring tools in one place.
• a consolidated view & management capability of system wide testing from acceptance & integration, performance through synthetic monitoring and chaos engineering.

Quality and testing is a critical part of any software application and it becomes no less important when building cloud native applications. In a distributed environment with many microservices relying on each other, containers spinning up and tearing down on a regular basis, it is imperative that teams have solid processes and test frameworks covering everything from unit, integration and acceptance testing, to performance testing and chaos engineering.

KuboValidate™ consists of a suite of open source testing frameworks and projects specifically assembled to address cloud native testing needs. We have not attempted to recreate the wheel here, instead KuboValidate™ aggregates several popular testing frameworks into an easy to use solution for cloud native projects:

• Acceptance & integration testing via Postman
• Performance testing via Jmeter and K6
• Chaos engineering/testing via Chaos Mesh
• Additional testing frameworks will be added in future versions

The management of these tests & results are aggregated into the KuboOperate™ UI for a consolidated view of test results, allowing for easy management and analysis.

In a similar vein to the development of reusable libraries and microservices with our KuboLib™ product, we have created KuboToolBox™ with the same mindset – to promote reuse and simplify our processes as much as possible. We have automated many tasks that we find are common and reusable across projects. We are offering our customers utility scripts from our toolbox so that they may derive the benefit of using them without having to invest the time and effort to build them from scratch.

KuboToolBox™ consists of a set of generic reusable utility scripts that can be used in the automation and operation of cloud native and other types of applications. Some examples of the type of utilities that exist within KuboToolBox™ include:

• KuboVault™ (Docker & SDK) which securely stores sensitive data at rest in a file & can be called programmatically via KuboLib™
• JWT generator
• Self-signed SSL generator with SAN
• Generic YAML recipes for Kubernetes deployments
• VIP via VRRP through keepalived running in a container
• Elastic cluster add-ons
• Script for validation of network connectivity

We continue to automate repeatable tasks and activities using utility scripts in support of the provisioning and management of cloud native deployments. As such, KuboToolBox™ will gradually expand over time, helping to simplify and streamline activities for our customers.