Strange Brew

ForgeRock Directory Services 7.0 was a big achievement for the Grenoble Directory team.  It is the only "Kubernetes native" directory where you can add a new replica using kubectl: kubectl scale sts/ds-idrepo --replicas=3 The 7.0 deployment is assembled using standard Kubernetes primitives such as StatefulSets , Persistent Volume Claims, and Services.  This is all built and orchestrated using Skaffold and Kustomize .  An emerging pattern in the Kubernetes world is the use of Custom Resources and Operators .  Broadly speaking, a custom resource is the declaration of the desired system state, and the operator's job is to observe the current state and bring the system into alignment with the declared state: source: https://blog.container-solutions.com/kubernetes-operators-explained The Kubernetes API server (the thing that responds to your kubectl commands) can be extended to handle new custom types.  A custom resource definition (CRD) describes to the API se...

There is an awesome new feature on Google Container Engine (GKE) that lets you combine autoscaling, node pools and preemptible VMs to save big $! The basic idea is to create a small cluster with an inexpensive VM type that will run 7x24. This primary node can be used for critical services that should not be rescheduled to another pod. A good example would be a Jenkins master server. Here is an example of how to create the cluster: gcloud alpha container clusters create $CLUSTER \ --network "default" --num-nodes 1 \ --machine-type $ {small} --zone $ZONE \ --disk-size 50 Now here is the money saver trick:  A second node pool is added to the cluster. This node pool is configured to auto-scale from one node up to a maximum. This additional node pool uses preemptible VMs. These are VMs that can be taken away at any time if Google needs the capacity, but in exchange you get dirt cheap images. For example, running a 4 core VM with 15GB of RAM for a month c...