In this Episode, Neependra founder of Cloudyuga and Rahul discuss the Neependra’s experience about starting with container technologies like docker, kubernetes etc. Neependra focuses on the challenges involved in using persistent volumes and how to overcome them using some third-party solutions. They also discuss how one can start learning this tools and what are the best places to start.
Further Neependra share’s his experience on when he decided to move into training people. He also believes that going forward containers will be a base for deployment terms like serverless.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

• BigBinary on Twitter


• Cloudyuga on Twitter


• Rahul on Twitter


• Neependra on Twitter


• Docker Cookbook


• Kubernetes


• Containerd


• CRI-O


• Rook

Transcript

[0:00:00 ] Rahul: Hello and welcome to the new episode of “All Things DevOps” podcast! And today we have Neependra Khare founder of “Cloud Yuga Technologies.” Welcome, Neependra to this “All Things DevOps” podcast! And I’d like you to introduce yourself to our audience.

[0:00:19 ] Neependra Khare: Thanks, Rahul! As you know my name is Neependra Khare and I’m the founder of “Cloud Yuga Technologies.” I’ve been in this industry for around 13 years now and I’ve seen the shift when people moved from Bare-Metal to VMs and this what I observed three years back that people are going to make the shift from VMs to containers. Luckily I got a chance to write a book on Docker, “Docker Cookbook” which got published in 2015 and also I became one of the organizers of Docker meetup group in Bangalore. While writing a book and during the meetup, I realized that there’s a skill gap and thus I decided to leave my full-time job at RedHat and started my own company “Cloud Yuga Technologies” and we are providing consulting and training around container technologies like docker, kubernetes and so on. Recently I have also published a course on Edx on “Introduction to kubernetes” by Linux Foundation which has I think more than 20,000 people reading around the world.

[0:01:20 ] Rahul: That sounds really amazing! And I have been watching you since my college days. I think that time you were in RedHat and mentoring some of the college interns and I had a chance, I think years back. So that was nice meeting you. Recently I saw your work on containers like docker and kubernetes, and also you have traveled almost around the globe for your workshops. So I just wanted to—I just want to ask you like how did you start your docker journey back in 2014 or 2015, where docker was just a new kid?

[0:02:00 ] Neependra Khare: So when I heard about docker first I was in Red Hat and somebody was talking in the mailing list that docker is something new with something you should check it out. So what happened is I just then just started researching about docker and saw that there is a meetup starting in Bangalore, the first meetup for docker by Shippable and then I went and joined that meetup but before that meetup, I did my homework and learned about what docker technologies, what containers are and so forth. So I did a pretty cool discussion with the founder of Shippable and that kind of inquisitive curiosity in the subject and as RedHat has been the open-source company so we started organizing docker meetups at RedHat office. And just like that I started writing blogs on containers, docker and so forth and then PacktPub approached me to write a book on docker I said, “Why not?” So that’s all where I started and while writing a book I kind of got to learn a lot of stuff because I was writing a book and that’s what I kind of a starting point in container world.

[0:03:03 ] Rahul: Interesting. So which was your first orchestration framework for deploying containers? Was it dockerswarm, kubernetes or something else?

[0:03:14 ] Neependra Khare: I couldn’t recall but I think it was OpenShift if you will… I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t know about OpenShift – Redhat has been using containers for long and I have been OpenShift as a Redhat employee. So if I think of that I have used OpenShift at the very beginning of containers and for the orchestration perspective, I think I used docker swarm first and then played with kubernetes in parallel because of the book. So I was trying both things in parallel so actually, I tried orchestration and kubernetes in parallel we can say.

[0:03:46 ] Rahul: OK, awesome. So looking out at your k8s 101 courses which is featured in Linux foundation as well and as you’ve already mentioned there are almost around 20k people have enrolled for it, right? I think that course was public since 2015 or 2016 and until that time I think kubernetes was really not matured or not production-ready. So people just started diving into kubernetes, some of them tried putting it into production, some of them just held it back. So what was the point when you decided that kubernetes…? I mean most of the time it is going to be a kubernetes as an orchestration framework for containers rather than other frameworks like, maybe ECS or Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm because as of now if you see that almost more than 60% of the people are using kubernetes as their container orchestration tool.

[0:04:47 ] Neependra Khare: Yeah, good question. So just to correct you a little bit there are two courses on EDX, one is on “Cloud Technologies” which was published on 2016 and Kubernetes course was published on 2017th of July. So the question was I think when I decided to kind of think about kubernetes going to be the orchestrator. So I think earlier this year when I was kind of getting more dive into kubernetes in docker swarm. Actually, I was seeing that both of this ecosystem are from each other like, if you think of docker swarm, Orchestration was pretty easy, but kubernetes was very difficult, right? So then kubernetes learned from them and meet the kubeadm and so forth by which we can start kubernetes quickly. But I think when I kind of compare these Docker Swarm in kubernetes because I’m delivering the classes to different clients I realize that, I can say the construct, the resources what the kubernetes provides kind of flexibility kubernetes gives to you that is much better in terms of Docker Swarm. And the kind of community support what you see in kubernetes that is just beyond imagination. So I think based on these two things because I’m seeing the demand in the industry and the kind of community support what I see, I kind of see that kubernetes is going to be the winner and that’s what we see now towards the end of this year that kubernetes are the container orchestrator to afford.

[0:06:14 ] Rahul: Yeah, yeah, so I’m just adding to your facts like 50k commits on Github and around a large number of contributors and one of the top five open-source projects on Github and in the open-source community. I mean we all have agreed about like kubernetes is something really great. So talking about kubernetes you just mentioned about kubeadm. I hope that is kubernetes cluster provisioning tool. There are some other tools as well. So I think at least for us the kubernetes cluster provisioning on production environment was not that easy but once we just get through it and once we dockerize our kubernetize our app deployment process or continuing integration and continuous deployment with the tools just be easy and it also works faster than the traditional architecture. But, yeah, when we talk about kubernetes there are multiple components if we are self-hosting our kubernetes cluster we have to manage our masters and those have to be highly available. So we deploy multi-master cluster. It is some sort of easy if you’re on a public cloud, something like AWS, Azure, Google cloud or some other clouds like digital ocean and Scaleway. But what are the tools you would recommend or do you use for Bare-metals and some other technologies like open-stack? Have you tried playing with Bare Metal and other cloud stacks?

[0:07:54 ] Neependra Khare: So, most of the time deployment is been on digital ocean and on the AWS cloud and of course GKE they just provision it quickly but for the Bare Metal or kind of playing with the local system I have been using kubeadm and that’s what I recommend, get started with kubeadm but when people are comfortable using that then we can go with kops. Then we can deploy the kubernetes cluster on the AWS and then use it. That’s what I kind of recommending people that once you kind of get familiar with kubeadm and because kubeadm is almost there but I think it’s lot in the GFEs… still works and people are using it. But on the cloud either if you go with AWS then I would recommend you to use Kops but if you’re going to Google cloud then just use GKE, just forget about the management part. And to the recent announcement with AWS reinvent I think once the AWS launches the Manage Kubernetes Cluster I think it’s going to be the real game changer in the cloud industry.

[0:08:58 ] Rahul: OK, we still have to wait because I don’t think it’s available in preview or it is available for you… So we have also been using kops and we also have tried some other tools like kubespray. I think it was named as kargo before.

[0:09:18 ] Neependra Khare: Right, right, right.
Rahul: So first th