The latest posts and insights about Ambassador Labs - our products, our ecosystem, as well as voices from across our community.
Article
Welcome to the second article of my CKAD Tips series where I share my learnings while studying for the CKAD. Every week, I will demystify Kubernetes concepts you need to know before taking the CKAD and simplify them using real-life examples to make preparing for and passing the CKAD easier for you. Getting Started with CKAD: What did I struggle with?
Kubernetes
First of all, what is CKAD? I bet you already know that since you are reading this article, but if you don’t, CKAD is an acronym for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer examination developed by The Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to help expand the Kubernetes ecosystem through a standardized training and certification. Even though the official CKAD website states that anyone who passes the exam has been certified to be able to design, build and deploy cloud-native applications for Kubernetes, some developers are still sceptical about taking the certification exam for different reasons. You’ll hear questions like, “Is the CKAD certification useful?”, “Is the CKAD exam worth it?”, “Will I understand Kubernetes after taking it?”, “Is the amount I’m paying for the certification worth it?”, “Will I be certified to do design, build and deploy applications for K8s, or is this just a bland promise to get me to pay for the course?”, amongst other things. If you are contemplating whether to take the CKAD exam, I’d strongly recommend that you should.
Article
In order to get started with this basic AWS + Kubernetes infrastructure fabric three things are absolutely required: An Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. An AWS user account with administrator privileges that allow you to provision the infrastructure fabric.
Service Mesh
Here we talk about using a service mesh to debug and mitigate some types of app failures. We’ll be looking at several of the capabilities that service meshes may provide. Each service mesh technology supports a unique set of such capabilities. We use examples from Linkerd to illustrate the capabilities that service meshes may provide, but the fundamental concepts discussed here will apply to any service mesh. Service Mesh Status Checks
Microservices
No application is an island. They constantly communicate with other applications (services) -- or, more precisely, instances of applications. Microservice architectures amplify the volume and frequency of these communications. What is service discovery?
Service Mesh
Observability: Telemetry and Metrics In addition to service discovery and resilience, service mesh technologies can also help with app observability. Observability is being able to monitor an app’s state and to determine at a high level what’s happened when something goes wrong with the app. Two terms that are frequently used when discussing observability are metrics and telemetry. Telemetry means the collection of data to measure something, and metrics is another name for those measures.
