Kubernetes is the best place in the world to have your app running and the worst place for a team to run an app.
How about that for summing things up?
That’s a quote from Ben Ghazi, co-founder of Codiac, which has built a software development platform for teams to run apps on Kubernetes without the hassles.
An engineer may use Codiac for all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC), but usually in design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. But what sets it apart? A unified interface that provides an engineer with on-demand infrastructure and advanced SDLC tools. Codiac is a central orchestrator of software delivery that manages the inside of a cluster and across all clusters.
“It’s infrastructure on demand,” Ghazi said. “It’s a container and in cluster management, and it’s software development life cycle work.”
Codiac built a CLI that can fit inside CI/CD pipelines. They can take continuous delivery off a customer’s plate and make it one line of code. And so, inside a CI/CD pipeline, the developer has all the CI needed to build a container. But when it comes time to deploy that container, it’s one line of code.
In a demo, the interface provided a window into the app-building process with Codiac’s tools that bridge infrastructure as code with the software. It’s an interface you rarely see in the Kubernetes world. It’s just simple. The goal? Get beyond the esoteric when building apps.
Software engineers need help with building an app that runs on Kubernetes. They can’t find their stuff. Where is it on AWS? Where is it on Azure?
“How do I pull all this stuff together?” asked Ghazi.
With containerization as the standard form of deploying and IAC as a way to script infrastructure, a software company that has been around for decades can use today’s containers to drag and drop components from Microsoft Azure and various cloud services onto Amazon Web Services.
Ghazi pointed to a box on the screen, a cabinet he calls it. Each cabinet is an environment that holds assets that may be anything, for example, a secrets manifest or a container image.
The cabinets he showed are all tied to namespaces. He showed how it worked in a multicloud, multicluster environment. He showed how they have worked to keep it simple so customers can deploy, manage containers, or set configurations without the esoteric syntax and the hassle of pulling it all together. Codiac helps in the version where something runs in the cluster where the microservices are deployed. It’s meant to be intuitive.
It’s a way of level setting, showing how to deploy, manage a container, or set those configurations without needing an artist’s talent. It’s now programmatic, the ingress, everything. The effort to make the service a great experience comes down to making things like ingress easier — providing a simple way to pull in services.
Codiac co-founder Mark Freydl said that without a unified interface, the engineer faces considerable complexity just by stitching things together. There could be hundreds of lines of YAML code, IAC, or any automation language a developer uses.
It would be a lot of code for somebody to go and do that, and then they have to pop it into a pipeline or use a complex system like ArgoCD.
Freydl said Kubernetes is phenomenal. He’s felt that way since the first day he saw it and realized what it could do. It culminated all the things he had been trying to do for a long time.
“And then you find out what a steep hill it is to climb to get all those pieces together,” Freydl said. “And then on top of that, having to perform a small task is not that big a deal, having to write a small script or make an update into a YAML file somewhere. That’s not that big a deal. But having to do that for everything, and having to do that for, say, 30 services that are running all these different versions? How do you do that by hand? It’s just not going to happen.”
Codiac provides a way to manage the manual work en masse to help the team develop a better workflow and a better management strategy, Freydl said.
Snapshots provide repeatability in Codiac. The CLI integrates ephemeral clusters. The clusters are created with the CLI, which can be customized for the engineer’s cloud provider. The cluster goes up and gets attached to an environment.
Users create ephemeral clusters and can take snapshots of the items. It allows the engineer to create clusters from archived snapshots.
Kubernetes is awesome. However, without easy reproducibility, the tasks for teams are overwhelming. Virtual clusters allow for clusters to be spun up and then deleted. The values are in the snapshot and archived for future use.
The post Codiac: Kubernetes Doesn’t Need To Be That Complex appeared first on The New Stack.
Codiac provides a way to manage the manual work en masse to help the team develop a better workflow and a better management strategy.