From Geko Cloud we are especially excited and proud to share this important synergy/event. A new stage of growth and very significant and relevant growth for Geko.

There are not many professional occasions in which you have the opportunity to see a company grow from startup mode to its consolidation, climbing to the top of the market in such a short time.
We have transformed and adapted over the months, but the essence of our pillars has always been the same:

• Customer Centric
• Technology Freedom
• Technical Excellence

We have been chosen by Claranet to lead the Public Cloud business unit in Spain. This will basically give way to being able to participate in larger projects and take on even more complex and cutting-edge challenges.

Our mission will be to provide Claranet with our knowledge management and incorporation of DevOps methodologies, infrastructure management in public Cloud, container management and microservices, to together achieve a greater market share and be the Cloud Consulting par excellence on a national level.

This operation also means that Geko Cloud rises to all levels of partnership with the main cloud providers, with which we will be able to offer a higher quality service to our clients, we will have the support of the country managers of all the main providers and we will provide a cost improvement in resale plans, as well as improvements in credits for pilot projects and proofs of concept.

Geko Cloud’s commitment and dedication to our customers will remain the same, as it is the core of our business. Also note that our differential value and the services we offer will continue to be based on:

• Direct and personalized treatment
• Free philosophy
• Customer centric
• Multidisciplinary technical team

The current founders, Jose Luis Sanchez and David Pujadas, will continue to exercise and develop the same skills as we have done until today.
The brand and composition of Geko Cloud will remain the same, as will its structure, work system and of course the team.

Geko Cloud to Claranet Group company

About Geko

We are a Cloud Consulting with a great capacity for adaptability in order to meet the needs of each of our clients.
At Geko Cloud we analyze your infrastructure in order to improve automation and internal processes, so that the deployment of your application is agile, efficient and secure, which leads to an improvement in time to market and your KPIs.
Unlike other companies, we do not work exclusively with any cloud service provider. We are free to adapt to the needs of our clients and introduce ourselves to their methodologies and work philosophy. Direct contact and proximity to our clients are a fundamental pillar in our service, which is why we work as one more piece of their internal team.

About Claranet

Founded in 1996, Claranet has evolved from one of the first ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to become a leading provider of technological services with a global reach.
Claranet are experts in modernizing and managing critical applications and infrastructures. They simplify IT service management so your customers can focus on their business. They offer a wide range of managed services, professional services, Cloud solutions, collaboration and connectivity, IT projects and cybersecurity.

For further information please do not hesitate to contact us!

La entrada Geko Cloud grows and joins the Claranet group se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

What is Azure?

 Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform offering a number of cloud services, such as computing, analytics, storage, and networking. Users can choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications in the public cloud. Azure offers 4 different forms of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless.

Advantages of using Azure

Each cloud provider has a series of characteristics that make it better than other competitors, in the next point we will explain some of the advantages of migrating to the cloud with Azure and that can help you clear up some doubts, such as whether this platform in the cloud adapts to your needs.

• PAY-PER-USE: Like AWS, Microsoft charges for Azure on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning you don’t need to maintain any hardware or invest in new infrastructure to grow your business, and you only pay for what you use.
• 22% of the cloud market: Microsoft Azure has grown to become the second of the top three public cloud platforms, just behind market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ahead of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). AWS has the largest market share, but Azure has the most regions, and GCP is growing rapidly.
  
• Security: Azure is secure. Instead of having all your data on-premises, it’s in the cloud, which means you don’t have to worry about hackers trying to access your data on-premises. Microsoft is responsible for the security of the infrastructure, and has several measures in place to ensure that its solutions remain secure.
  
• Scalable: Azure can grow with your business or shrink quickly if you need to downsize.
• Service offerings: Azure has a wide variety of service offerings that continue to grow every day such as analytics, identity and access management tools, and IoT solutions. Since Microsoft has been supporting on-premises customers for more than 40 years, it has an extensive hybrid cloud offering to bring all of its existing customers to the cloud. They also have very good integration with existing tools and technologies such as Visual Studio, Active Directory, and File Storage.

Azure vs AWS

Currently, among the most important cloud providers that exist in the market, AWS is in the first place, followed by Azure, so it is not surprising that comparisons are made between these two large companies. Some of the differences are:

• Database: AWS uses a relational database as a service using RDS, while DynamoDB uses it for NoSQL and for caching uses Elasticache. Meanwhile, Azure uses SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL database for relational database, it makes use of Cosmos DB for NoSQL solutions and Redis Cache for caching.
  
• Open Source Developers: AWS is great for open source developers as it embraces Linux users and offers various integrations for different open source applications. Azure, meanwhile, offers users the ability to use their currently active directory to log in to the Azure cloud platform and run the .net framework on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
• Networking: Azure offers a virtual network through which we can create isolated networks, subnets, route tables, range of private IP addresses just like in AWS.
• Storage:  Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Azure Blob Storage are the competing object storage services. Despite the variation in terminology used to describe their services, they offer similar functionality. Each object is stored in an assembly unit, and has a unique key and an associated metadata record that contains the pertinent information: object size, last modified date, media type, and so on.
  

If you want to know more about the differences between these two providers, in our post “AWS vs Azure”, we give you more details.

Azure pricing and costs

Switching to a new cloud provider, price is an important factor to consider that also raises many questions and concerns. Like other public cloud providers, Azure offers a lot of different services, products, and locations. All at different prices.

Azure-native tools like Azure Cost Management can help you monitor, visualize, and optimize your cloud spend. It is also possible to use third-party tools, such as Cloudability or RightScale, to manage the use of Azure resources and the associated costs.

If you want to know an estimate on Azure prices, we recommend you read our colleague Antonio’s post Azure: Cost estimation and best practices | Gecko Cloud

Azure and Geko Cloud 

Microsoft Azure enables businesses and individuals to build, run, and manage applications and solve various technical challenges with flexibility across multiple clouds and on-premises data centers.

At Geko Cloud we are cloud experts and we work with DevOps methodology, accompanying our clients throughout the process from migration to cloud management. Contact us without any commitment!

La entrada What is Azure? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

This issue consists on that clients will wrongly identify correct, valid certificates as invalid, because the CA they are based on is now invalid and the client software was not updated to trust the new CA, so it is now giving these authentication problems. We have identified that this is a problem with older software clients like curl, or older versions of programming languages like php that do not have this CA installed in them and thus fail to access clients with letsencrypt certificates. 

Scope

Affected software versions

– OpenSSL <= 1.0.2

– Windows < XP SP3

– macOS < 10.12.1

– iOS < 10 (iPhone 5 is the lowest model that can get to iOS 10)

– Android < 7.1.1 (but >= 2.3.6 will work if served ISRG Root X1 cross-sign)

– Mozilla Firefox < 50

– Ubuntu < 16.04

– Debian < 8

– Java 8 < 8u141

– Java 7 < 7u151

– NSS < 3.26
-CDN like Cloudflare

– Amazon FireOS (Silk Browser)

This is an effect that can not only be felt by users or client applications, but by the application itself. For example, if your application is running on a system using a version lower than the detailed above, like a webserver with openssl 1.0.1, requests to any letsencrypt-backed service will fail. 

Remediation

Solution to this problem is to upgrade the client version of the software stack so it trusts the new root CA as a full solution. You can also patch the issue by modifying your software so it doesn’t check the validity of the CA, although keep in mind that this should be a temporary solution as it is an insecure software practice and should not be left applied in a production environment more time than necessary.

Here’s more technical information about this issue:

https://letsencrypt.org/docs/dst-root-ca-x3-expiration-september-2021/

La entrada SSL Root Certificates Let’s encrypt Issue se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

Before we dive into Kubernetes, first of all, you need to know what container orchestration is. Container technologies have radically changed the landscape of systems and the way software is packaged and deployed. Some of the benefits that containers bring are portability, agility, speed, immutability, and fault isolation.

A container orchestrator is a software that manages and coordinates containers in an automated way. There are several container orchestration tools such as Docker Swarm, Google Container Engine, Amazon ECS, and others. However, in this post, we will focus on Kubernetes, where we will explain the concept, most notable components of the tool and discuss the benefits that Kubernetes can offer, among other points.

Definition – What is Kubernetes?

Originally developed by Google, Kubernetes, or k8s for short, is a container orchestration tool. Kubernetes facilitates the deployment and operation of applications in a microservices architecture. It does this by creating an abstraction layer on top of a cluster of hosts, so development teams can deploy their applications and let Kubernetes manage the deployment of containers.

Platforms that offer Kubernetes

There are several cloud platforms that offer Kubernetes as a service. These platforms make the job easier by providing an interface that makes it easy to deploy applications on Kubernetes without having to worry about configuring and managing the various components of the cluster. Some of them are Amazon EKS, Digitalocean, OpenShift, or Rancher, among others.

Some Kubernetes cluster elements

Kubernetes has a number of features that allow you to provision and deploy your own containerized software. If you’re new to Kubernetes, the terminology can be new, and require some extra learning. Here are some of the basics:

• Pods: The minimum unit that can be deployed with Kubernetes. Each pod can contain one to several containers running on the same shared storage/network resources as the pod.
• Nodes: A physical or virtual machine that hosts the pods that perform the workload of an application. 
• Control plane: The control plane runs the Kubernetes components that provide the core functionalities: exposing the Kubernetes API, scheduling workload deployments, managing the cluster, and direct communications throughout the system. 
• Cluster: A group of nodes working together, which run containerized applications. Clusters consist of master and worker nodes. There can be one or more master nodes and zero or more worker nodes. For example, you can have several nodes in the same cluster running the same containers.  
• Deployment: Kubernetes deployments define the scale at which you want to run your application by allowing you to set the details of how you want pods to be replicated across Kubernetes nodes. Deployments describe the number of identical pod replicas you want to run and the preferred update strategy for updating the deployment, among other things. Kubernetes will track the health of the pods, and remove or add pods as needed to bring the application deployment to the desired state. The deployment provides an abstraction layer that allows pods to be replaced easily and transparently. Pods in a deployment can be located on different nodes.
• Service: A set of pods running the same application or microservice can be grouped together to form a deployment, as we have already seen. Since these pods can be replaced and, due to the dynamic nature of Kubernetes, the different IP addresses of the pods will change, there is a need for a network resource to establish an entry point to these pods. A service abstracts away the underlying network complexity, making it possible to provide a single, unchanging entry point while making the layout of the pods that make up the deployment transparent.
• Ingress controller: It is software that provides reverse proxy functionality, configurable traffic routing, and TLS termination for Kubernetes services. A gateway driver is installed on the cluster, and then gateway rules are configured for a specific service or services.
• Kubectl: a command-line interface that sends a request to the Kubernetes API, either with specific commands, with the contents of a YAML manifest, or with data fetch requests.
• Kubelet: is a service running inside each node, which communicates with the control plane.

There are other Kubernetes components such as daemonsets, namespaces, replicaSets, secrets, and even custom resources. The ones mentioned here are the ones you are most likely to interact with when deploying applications on Kubernetes.

Learn more about when and how to use Kubernetes  

Do you want to know more about k8s? In our Youtube channel, we explain you from a business perspective, what needs it covers, its advantages, and when to use it.

Geko and Kubernetes – Why choose Geko Cloud?

If you are using or considering using containers to streamline building, scaling, and deploying your microservices-based application, Kubernetes gives you the ability to manage the infrastructure using declarative YAML files.

Container lifecycle management with Kubernetes using your deployments and operators along with a DevOps approach allows software development and IT operations to adapt to support the CI/CD channel. At Geko Cloud we are at your disposal if you are looking for a partner to implement Kubernetes, migrate to the cloud, move to a microservices model or manage your platform in the cloud. Contact us to find out more about our services.

La entrada What is Kubernetes? se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.

You probably already know something about what Kubernetes is, or you’ve heard of it, but if you don’t quite understand the advantages of this powerful tool, in Geko we want to guide you.

As you may already know, Kuberentes is a container orchestrator that allows you to deploy your production applications to the cloud in an automated way. It was developed by Google and subsequently donated to the community, making it an Open Source project.

With Kubernetes, multiple parts of the same application can run in isolated containers, so if one part of an application becomes inoperative, only that part can be restored instead of the entire server. This saves time and increases productivity when developing applications and putting them into production.

At Geko Cloud we are experts in Kubernetes and the use of microservices architectures, something that addresses both the need to make better use of computing resources and the need to maintain increasingly complex web applications.

What are the advantages of using Kubernetes in your business?

We will tell you some of them:

• Unify the deployment model.
• Increases accountability and autonomy of the development team.
• Achieves high-speed horizontal growth, i.e. scalability, in addition to vertical node autoscaler and HPA.
• DRP or business continuity.
• Kubernetes is a cutting-edge technology, but it has been around long enough to warrant its use, and there is a large community behind it to support it.
• There are a number of cloud-managed K8s platforms that allow you to eliminate complexity.
• It is cloud agnostic, offering scalability between environments and infrastructures.
• It provides tracking and security.

But you also need to know when not to use Kubernetes

As we indicated at the beginning, we want to guide you on when to use or not to use Kubernetes and what to consider when using it.

• You should keep in mind that Kubernetes needs an initial implementation and operational cost.
• It is advisable to implement it as a business model not as a platform.
• Operating a Kuberentes cluster without Cloud as the management layer adds some complexity, if a whole K8S cluster goes down, everything will go down.
• It is a platform that was designed for small stateless apps and their interconnection, not designed to deploy DB infrastructure or other high-risk infrastructures. But with the improvements in high availability and new features it allows more and more structures to be brought in internally. The new stateful support mitigates this.

Learn more about when and how to use Kubernetes in our webinar

Watch it here:

We hope you find it useful to learn more about Kubernetes and we encourage you to subscribe to stay up to date with new content.
At Geko Cloud we are at your disposal if you are looking for a partner to implement Kubernetes, migrate to the cloud, switch to a microservices model or manage your platform in the cloud.

Contact us to learn more about our services, thank you for reading and leave us your comments!

La entrada What is Kubernetes and when to use it se publicó primero en Geko Cloud.