Final Remarks

Congratulations, you have successfully completed the module: Kubernetes Monitoring, Logging and Auto-Scaling. 🎉

Summary#

We explored quite a few topics that are beyond “normal” Kubernetes usage. We learned how to scale Pods using HorizontalPodAutoscaler. We explored how to do just that using Cluster Autoscaler. More importantly, we saw how we can leverage Alertmanager to create notifications that will alert us when there is an issue. We learned that gathering metrics from exporters might not be enough, so we instrumented our applications as a way of providing lower-level metrics that give us deep insights into the state of our applications.

We also explored HorizontalPodAutoscaler's ability to use custom metrics. We hooked it into Prometheus thus extending scaling thresholds to almost any formula we could imagine. We explored ways that dashboards can be made more useful than traditional “pretty colors” many are instinctively drawn to. Finally, we discussed the need for centralized logging as well as a few tools that might help us debug issues discovered through alerts.

We went beyond common Kubernetes operations and managed to make our clusters more robust and more reliable. We made a step forward towards mostly autonomous self-adaptive systems that require human intervention only in exceptional cases that cannot be resolved automatically.

What’s next?#

Now that we are well-acquainted with advanced Kubernetes techniques, it’s time to explore Jenkins X with Kubernetes.