The New Stack’s Top Kubernetes Stories of 2021

The end of the year is traditionally a time of reflection and over the course of 2021 we have seen a number of significant technology advances emerge. Their effects are evident from the way we live and work to how we interact with each other,

This year, with organizations venturing out in search of growth as the pandemic recedes (for now), many of the best practices and technology trends materializing are a result of the accelerating transformation to digital.

For the next month, we’ll be reflecting on the people and projects that have shaped the developer experience over the past year and led to significant progress in Kubernetes, DevOps, open source, security and web development.

In the realm of Kubernetes, many of these developments, like multicloud and scaled-out microservices, have started to take shape and impact organizational agility while opening new ways to look at security.

First up, a look at the top stories that have influenced Kubernetes readers in 2021.

The New Stack’s Kubernetes Stories of 2021:

#1: Conductor: Why We Migrated from Kubernetes to Nomad — Ever seen the “Game of Thrones,” “Allied,” “Star Trek Beyond,” “The Walk,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”? The cloud-based visual-effects rendering platform used to produce scenes for these movies is done using software from Conductor Technologies. As the business grew, the company made the decision to move from Kubernetes to a multicloud offering using HashiCorp Nomad. This story by Conductor Technologies engineers Jonathan Cross and Carlos Robles shares their experience using Nomad, including how and why they made the decision.

#2: WebAssembly Aims to Eliminate the File System — Originally designed for the browser, WebAssembly (WASM) is a secure build-once-run-anywhere runtime that can ingest code from your favorite programming language (assuming your favorite language is C/C++, C# or Rust) and emit superfast bytecode targeted for the browser. This story explores the latest plans for the technology and the impact it’s making on the Kubernetes community with companies like SUSE and British Broadcasting System (BBC).

#3: Stateful Workloads on Kubernetes with Container Attached Storage — Kubernetes wasn’t built to handle stateful workloads which has created numerous challenges for developers; among them: bottlenecks. With the need for stateless applications to work in tandem with stateful ones, this story dives into the challenges and solutions like container attached storage (CAS) to help developers avoid the blender. Thanks to our sponsor, MayaData for this one.

#4: How Vodafone Greece Built 80 Java Microservices in Quarkus — For developers who learned Java as their first language, much has changed with the rise of mobile devices, JavaScript and cloud-based deployments. But if you were tossed back into the Java world like Vodafone Greece’s Backend Chapter Lead, how would you find your way back to the event-driven programming environments and highly scalable containers? Thanks to our sponsor, Red Hat, this post takes us through the digital transformation journey of one of the largest telephone networks in Greece.

#5: A Deep Dive into Architecting a Kubernetes Infrastructure — The Kubernetes ecosystem can be complex; breaking down the infrastructure one piece at a time can help developers architect their infrastructure in the best possible way. In this post, founder, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Timecampus, a bootstrapped startup that is working on building a Time Management Platform, takes a closer look at setting up your Kubernetes architecture based on your use cases. Explore the various decisions you may need to make, depending on your constraints.