Kubecon, the annual Kubernetes conference was held and some interesting new and improved tools were announced and/or released during that period.

Cloudflare Warp

Cloudflare Warp was recently introduced, and is still in beta, as a tool to expose your locally running web applications to the Internet. That means you can easily share your local development environment with someone, regardless of where they are in the world and regardless of how your local network connection is set up. This is useful for a lot of development work as it means you don’t need to think about that.

However, now Cloudflare went a step further and created an Ingress controller for Kubernetes that uses Warp. This enables you in a simple and easy way to quickly and securely expose your Kubernetes services. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to play with this yet, but it sounds like a great solution at the very least for speeding up development¹. They’ve got documentation for using it with the major cloud providers, locally, and a full ready-to-use integration with StackPointCloud.

Virtual Kubelet; Open Service Broker; Kashti

Azure introduced several new tools for Kubernetes. With ACI, Azure was the first major cloud provider supporting serverless containers. As I mentioned last week, AWS has now joined this list, but Azure still has a head start with the tooling as can be seen with their new Virtual Kubelet. This open source tool is a way to integrate serverless containers into a Kubernetes cluster. While obviously built with ACI in mind it already has support for Hyper.sh. Hopefully, instead of building their own solution, AWS will use this as a basis for their promised integration of Fargate into EKS.

In a similar vein, the Open Service Broker for Azure allows for integration with the rest of the Azure infrastructure from a Kubernetes cluster. The example in the above documentation shows how after enabling the service broker you can have a helm chart spin up a database instead of only Kubernetes resources. Sounds like powerful stuff.

The third tool is a missing piece for Draft, Helm, and Brigade. Kashti is a dashboard and visualization for your Kubernetes pipelines. Specifically, for workflows from Brigade. This basically allows you to create a CI/CD pipeline within Kubernetes and see how it all runs with the required output.

Metaparticle

Another project introduced is Metaparticle. Metaparticle is basically a standard library for solving some common problems for applications in a Kubernetes cluster. It’s a work in progress, but it already has some solutions for things like replication and sharding. Aside from wanting to provide more solutions, Metaparticle is currently limited to 3 languages as it’s only available for JavaScript/Node, Java, and .Net. However, it sounds like a worthwhile project so I expect that we’ll see quite a bit of activity in both of these directions to solve common issues and make it easier to focus on your actual application².