Due to three factors, Kubernetes clusters will be the foundation for blockchain networks’ adoption in both the public and private sectors.

(1) Simpler Deployments

(2) Interoperability

(3) Upgradeability

We will take a deep dive into these factors later on.

Kubernetes as a tool:

A portable, adaptable, open-source platform, Kubernetes allows for declarative setup and automation of containerized workloads and services. Its ecology is vast and expanding quickly. The tools, services, and support for K8 are widely accessible.

The management environment offered by Kubernetes is focused on containers. The processing, networking, and storage infrastructure are coordinated in support of the user workloads. The convenience of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and the flexibility of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) enables mobility between infrastructure providers.

The Blockchain: 

A decentralized, unchangeable, and open database is essentially what the blockchain is. Due to the peer-to-peer network architecture of blockchain technology, transaction data is not under the control of a single centralized organization. All participants in the blockchain network have trustworthy public access to all transactions stored in a chain of blocks.

Blockchain ensures that connected blocks are resistant to changes and alterations by using consensus procedures and cryptography.

How can Blockchain applications utilize Kubernetes?

Blockchain is beginning to be adopted by businesses due to its many applications, like transferring cryptocurrency, information, agro blockchain, or purchasing and selling NFTs. Due to its streamlined pod, container deployments and, Kubernetes (or K8s) can assist enterprises in implementing blockchain.

Being cloud independent in business operations enables all parties participating in a service or product to access the same data stored on a blockchain without disclosing confidential and internal information. Kubernetes can configure, install, and maintain a company’s private blockchain with less manual labor while still providing the necessary components to keep the network secure, scalable, and fail-safe because of its distributed performance and pod deployments.

Although Kubernetes aids in the deployment of blockchains, a few configurations must be made by developers manually. These include choosing a protocol image and additional components, creating YAML manifests and Helm charts, and using Helm-install to test the Blockchain technology in Kubernetes clusters before it is made available to the general public.

Kubernetes clusters are being adopted by many companies in the blockchain space due to the following factors:

Simpler Deployments: 

The deployment and management of the network itself must be easy to use in order to create blockchain applications.

You must choose from a bewildering amount of options while creating a straightforward dApp on the Ethereum network: Will your main coding language be Solidity or Vyper?  What development framework should you use—Truffle Suite or OpenZeppelin SDK? The sheer number of developer tools is enough to put both newbies and seasoned programmers off.

With Kubernetes, It will be simple to deploy blockchains by selecting a protocol image and the required component images, creating YAML manifests and doing so using helm install. 

Interoperability:

Applications running in Kubernetes clusters are compatible with all forms of infrastructure, allowing service interoperability between enterprises with various architectural styles. The same application can be dispersed and hosted by various cloud providers. 

Blockchain applications are no different in this regard. Through their respective Kubernetes engines, IBM Cloud and AWS already offer comprehensive templates for creating blockchain networks.

Upgradeability: 

Helm charts offer a more subtle benefit of blockchains on Kubernetes. Organizations have the option to swiftly launch new networks with updated functionality, upgrade network artifacts, and backup/restore a network’s whole state by architecting networks using Helm charts.

Use Cases

Docker: 

By utilizing Docker, each blockchain node is guaranteed to be operational and running without requiring individual virtual machines to be configured. The Docker Hub offers Hyperledger, Ethereum, and Quorum images as starting points for swiftly and securely setting up the blockchain network.

Using Docker to set up a blockchain network allows for quicker software delivery and release, saving time, effort, and money.

Microsoft and Helm:

Helm is a package manager that enables you to discover, share, and use applications created for Kubernetes. The Kubernetes package management’s Helm charts, offer a higher-level construct that enables users to create, upgrade, and roll back entire applications without managing each Kubernetes resource separately (services, deployments, etc.)

Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) gives users the ability to customize virtual machines and the number of nodes to use Hyperledger Fabric to make blockchains fail-safe, just like any other Kubernetes Managed services.

IBM Cloud: 

Businesses may deploy the development, testing, and production environments however they see fit using the IBM Blockchain Platform, which speeds up the release cycle for new blockchain technologies.

By controlling all blockchain nodes from a single dashboard and streamlining the deployment process, IBM’s Blockchain Platform enables businesses to deploy their blockchains in any cloud ecosystem, whether it be on IBM’s clouds or with another cloud service provider.

Additionally, using IBM Cloud Kubernetes Services and its current administrative technology enables developers to easily grow the ecosystems employed in a Blockchain.

Here is the guide to installing Blockchain on Kubernetes

Final Thoughts:

Even if blockchain is becoming more and more relevant every day, it has a long way to go before it is widely adopted. Its considerable complexity and integration with the current infrastructure architecture that enterprises utilize today will be one of the barriers to adoption. By using Kubernetes clusters to deploy blockchain networks and their individual components, these difficulties may be largely abstracted. But when examining significant infrastructure firms and case studies, the overall opinion points to Blockchain on Kubernetes as the preferred method for adoption.

Organizations can establish the following roles in order to successfully utilize Kubernetes in a blockchain service:

1. Kubernetes-based cloud administrator: provides and keeps an eye on the blockchain’s architecture.

2. Blockchain Administrator: uses Hyperledger Fabric to manage the blockchain platform.

3. Blockchain developer:  creates the apps that are used in a blockchain.

Looking for a Team who can easily help migrate your Blockchain infrastructure to Kubernetes?

Deqode’s Team as a service model provides specialists who can help you easily deploy complicated applications through Kubernetes.

Visit Deqode.com for more info

The post How is Kubernetes enabling Blockchain? appeared first on Deqode Blog.

First, let us understand what Azure sentinel is and how it works.

What is Microsoft Azure sentinel? 

Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security native, and data delivery tool. It delivers security analytics data of your infrastructure and also threat-related issues across the enterprise, it provides a  good solution for attack detection, threat visibility, and threat response.

Some of the most common use of Azure sentinel is as follows – 

1) It collects data from your infrastructure and native applications and provides a proper UI for this

2) It detects the threat and acts accordingly

3) Investigates threats with Azure AI

4) Responds to threats actively with automation acts 

What are the updates in Azure sentinel- 

1) New automation rules – 

They have now automated run books that are built on the alert trigger. Previously this can be run only by attaching them to analytics rules on an individual basis. With this alert trigger, a single automation rule can be attached to many analytics rules. It will allow you to manage playbooks and analytics in a centralized way.

2) Integrated Data loss prevention in Microsoft sentinel – 

You can view all the DLP alerts under incidents in Microsoft 365 defender incident queue. You can retain the alerts for 180 days. You can also hunt for compliance logs for the security logs under advance hunting.

3) Custom Log ingestion – 

 It allows you to send custom-format logs from any data source to your Log Analytics workspace, and store those logs either in certain specific standard tables or in custom-formatted tables that you create.

4) View MITRE support – 

Microsoft Sentinel now provides a new MITRE page, which highlights the MITRE tactic and technique coverage you currently have, and can configure, for your organization.

Select items from the Active menus at the top of the page to view the detections currently active in your workspace, and the simulated detections available for you to configure.

5) Restore archive logs from search – 

When you need to do a full investigation on data stored in archived logs, restore a table from the search page in Microsoft Sentinel. It Specifies a target table and time range for the data you want to restore. Within a few minutes, the log data is restored and available within the Log Analytics workspace.

These were the lates updates on Azure sentinal. If you want to know more about Azure DevOps and its offerings, click here.

The post What’s new in Azure Sentinel? appeared first on Deqode Blog.

Before we dive deeper into it, let’s understand the what and why of Kubernetes.  

Kubernetes on-premise is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, facilitating declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. K8’s services, support, and tools are widely available and it’s a tool that is becoming indispensable for containerization.

Kubernetes On-Premise

Despite a drastic shift towards cloud-native infrastructure, many organizations do not wish to move away from their on-prem infrastructure. However, they still want to benefit from Kubernetes to bring cloud-native features such as increased scalability, high availability, and flexibility to the on-prem workloads. It has proven to ease migration with cloud-native workloads. 

On-Premises + Kubernetes

Why do organizations choose the path of running Kubernetes in their own data centers, compared to the relative “cake-walk” with public cloud providers? There are typically a few important reasons why an Enterprise may choose to invest in a Kubernetes on-premises strategy. 

Here are a few of them. 

1) Compliance and Data Privacy

2) Business Policy Reasons

3) Being Cloud Agnostic to Avoid Lock-in

4) Cost

Adding cloud-native functionality to your on-premises workloads can be challenging. The on-premises K8 setup requires starting from scratch. Enterprises looking to venture into this territory need a designated team of K8 experts who can set everything up. 

Let’s take a look at some overarching challenges with K8. 

Top 5 Challenges Running Kubernetes on-premises

Here are five notable Kubernetes challenges.

ETCD

One of the key challenges is managing highly available etcd clusters. As the etcd cluster achieves high availability by tolerating minor member failures, you need to take frequent backups to ensure business continuity in case the cluster goes down and the etcd data is lost.

Load balancing

There are two main steps involved in containerizing applications and deploying them on K8: deploying the application and exposing it to external and internal users. And as your application grows, providing it with Load Balanced access becomes essential. One of the important challenges is to make sure that load balancing is available for both your cluster master nodes and your application services running on Kubernetes. 

Availability and Auto-scaling

While implementing Kubernetes on-premise, it is critical to ensure that your Kubernetes infrastructure is highly available having multiple K8 clusters, across different availability zones. Auto-scaling for the nodes of your cluster is equally essential to scape up and scale it back as per the needs. 

Networking 

The old-fashioned networking methods are not very much compatible with Kubernetes. Due to that, the challenges increase along with the scale of your deployment. Moreover, the networking is very specific to your data center configuration. 

Monitoring

You will need to invest in tooling to monitor the health of your K8 clusters in your Kubernetes on-premise environment. If you have existing monitoring and log management tools like Datadog or Splunk, most of them have specific capabilities around Kubernetes monitoring. Or you may consider investing in an open source monitoring stack designed to help you monitor K8 clusters such as Prometheus and Grafana.

Final Thoughts

Kubernetes is not hard to implement, it is the operations that can make it hard to set up. Overall having Kubernetes on-premise is a necessity for businesses. It allows a high level of availability and flexibility which wasn’t possible in the existing infrastructures. In the future, implementing on-premises K8 will get easier opening many avenues for organizations to switch to hybrid cloud. For instance, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers the quickest way to start developing and deploying cloud-native apps, with built-in code-to-cloud pipelines and guardrails. Enterprises can have the freedom to manage the workloads they want to keep on-prem or on the cloud platform making it even more efficient.

The post Kubernetes on-premise: Top 5 Challenges appeared first on Deqode Blog.

What is Cloud-Native?

Ask ten different people and you will receive ten different answers.

So, according to Cloud-Native Computing Foundation’s official definition:

“Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.

These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.”

Developing an application has become very complex with users demanding more and more and better UI/UX. Users expect rapid responsiveness, innovative features, and zero downtime. Problems with performance, errors, or speed are no longer acceptable.

Businesses now focus on strategic transformation that can speed up business velocity and growth. Cloud-native is all about that speed and agility. Selling an idea to the market has become more crucial. 

Companies like Netflix, Uber, WeChat have achieved great pace, agility, and scalability with this.

“Netflix has 600+ services in production. Deploys hundred times per day.”

This architecture enables these companies to respond to market conditions. They can immediately update small areas of a live, complex application, and scale those areas as required.

This blog series will tell you all you need to know about what cloud-native is and why it matters. There are three parts:

• Cloud-native architecture: what is it and why does it matter?
• Cloud-native development: how does the cloud change how you develop?
• Principles and practices for Cloud-native: tips on how to go ahead on cloud

In this blog, we will be discussing Cloud-Native Architecture.

Cloud-Native Architecture: What is it and why does it matter?

What is Cloud-Native Architecture?

An architecture or a system built to exist and run in the cloud is a cloud-native architecture. Unlike legacy systems, cloud systems don’t rely on hardware and software. Flexibility is one of the main advantages of this architecture.

Cloud-native architectures are deployed on a cloud platform. It leverages the cloud philosophy of distributed systems. This thus enables these architectures to take full advantage of the latest and best technologies around distributed systems.

The cloud-native architecture utilizes cloud services such as EC2, S3, Lambda from AWS, etc. to allow dynamic and agile application development. Microservices are at the core of cloud-native application architecture. Each microservice is made to execute a different function, whether implementing capabilities, communicating, or running processes.

Why Is this Architecture Important?

Cloud-native removes constraints and shortens the path to business value.

Let me explain with an example.

You have a payment application and, the user feedback for your app suggests that users want a passbook feature in the app.

Now, without cloud-native, you will start by thinking, how to deploy, what network you need, and, you will think about the customer.

But this setup removes the need for servers, operating systems, orchestration layers, and networking which, puts your code front and centre of everything. Your team can straight away try out and experiment with things.

Cloud-native removes the constraints of “what if we did this?” With this, you focus more on the products and not pipelines. Fix errors in your app and not in your database replication.

The Benefits of Cloud-Native Architecture

~ Removes Constraints to Rapid Innovation

The traditional systems are slow to adapt and at times are inflexible to the changing needs. But, with this architecture, the software delivery pipeline has undergone a huge transformation. Be it with build automation, test automation, or deployment automation.  In DevOps, the automation is done across the software delivery process.

~ Brings You Closer to the User

The key benefit of cloud-native is eliminating non-customer-focused activities. The closer developers are to the users, the better understanding they have of the product. 

Customers these days expect a rapid release. Cloud-native architecture lets you roll out features to a small percentage of your users, where you can test prototypes with actual customers in real-life situations.

~ Cost-effective

In the cloud, you only pay for what you use and don’t have to buy anything up front. Rather than using infrastructure, containers are used in cloud-native which are easier to manage and secure applications. Kubernetes is used for managing resources in the cloud. Kubernetes along with an open-source model and few cloud-native tools drives down costs. 

~ Easy Access to New Tools and Services

With the cloud, we have access to new tools and services. Cloud-native has many options to make infrastructure management effortless for example serverless platforms like Azure Functions and AWS Lambda.  

Serverless computing platforms let you upload code in the form of functions and the platform runs those functions for you so you don’t have to worry about provisioning cloud instances, configuring networking, or allocating enough storage.

~ Secure, Transparent, and Reliable

With modern cloud-native approaches like microservices architecture and Kubernetes in the cloud, you can easily build applications to be fault-tolerant with resiliency and self-healing built-in.

Because of this design, even if any failures happen you can isolate the impact of the incident. Therefore, it doesn’t take down the entire application.

~ DevOps and agile frameworks

For this approach, groups within IT and business lines need to collaborate.

Development teams must partner with IT operations and the lines of business to deliver needed business functionalities. This, therefore, leads to a shift in culture away from step-by-step monolithic development practices to a more collaborative, agile method. While new tools and technology can help start to break down the barriers that monolithic processes have created over time, a DevOps culture is predicated on collaboration.

Also read – https://deqode.com/blog/cloud-gaming/

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