enhancements VS pixie

In September of 2016 the enhancement #88 (KEP) issue is created to support out-of-tree cloud providers (pluggable).

The motivation is more the latter, but it's not at all clear the proposed removal of the embedded kustomize will proceed, given the compatibility implications. See discussion at https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/issues/4706#issue... and following.

(I do see there are some proposed enhancements related to profiles that might help here)

Thanks for these links!

I picked out one at random just to check if my skeptical reaction is fair: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/tree/master/keps/...

- OK, this is actually a really good and useful doc!

- However, it's not an up-front design doc, it has clearly been written after the bulk of the work has been done, to explain and justify rolling out a big change. (See the "implementation history" timeline: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/tree/master/keps/...)

- It looks like the template wasn't very useful; most of the required sections are marked "N/A", and there are comments like The best test for work like this is, more or less, "did it work?"

> was always told early on that although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart, they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances (because of "security" which never really made sense their reasoning).

The reasoning is basically that there are some security and isolation guarantees you don't get in Kubernetes that you do get on bare metal or (to a somewhat lesser extent) in VMs.

In particular for Kubernetes, Vault wants to run as a non-root user and set the IPC_LOCK capability when it starts to prevent its memory from being swapped to disk. While in Docker you can directly enable this by adding capabilities when you launch the container, Kubernetes has an issue because of the way it handles non-root container users specified in a pod manifest, detailed in a (long-dormant) KEP: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/... (tl;dr: Kubernetes runs the container process as root, with the specified capabilities added, but then switches it to the non-root UID, which causes the explicitly-added capabilities to be dropped).

You can work around this by rebuilding the container and setting the capability directly on the binary, but the upstream build of the binary and the one in the container image don't come with that set (because the user should set it at runtime if running the container image directly, and the systemd unit sets it via systemd if running as a systemd service, so there's no need to do that except for working around Kubernetes' ambient-capability issue).

> It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)."

0 is not the request we've defined. And that makes sense. Memory QoS has been in alpha since Kubernetes 1.22 (August 2021) and according to the KEP data was still in alpha as of 1.27.

Note: There's actually a Structured Authentication Config established via KEP-3331. It's in v1.28 as a feature flag gated option and removes the limitation of only having one OIDC provider. I may look into doing an article on it, but for now I'll deal with the issue in a manner that should work even with a bit older versions versions of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes supports a skew policy of n+2 between API server and kubelet. This means if your CP and DP are both on 1.20, you could upgrade your control plane twice (1.20 -> 1.21 -> 1.22) before you need to upgrade your data plane. And when it comes time to upgrade your data plane you can jump from 1.20 to 1.22 to minimize update churn. In the future, this skew will be opened to n+3 https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/tree/master/keps/sig-architecture/3935-oldest-node-newest-control-plane

The KEP (Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal) is linked to in the PR [1]. From the summary:

> Sidecar containers are a new type of containers that start among the Init containers, run through the lifecycle of the Pod and don’t block pod termination. Kubelet makes a best effort to keep them alive and running while other containers are running.

[1] https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/tree/master/keps/...

This is where the new feature of mutable scheduling directives for jobs comes into play. This feature enables the updating of a job's scheduling directives before it begins. Essentially, it allows custom queue controllers to influence pod placement without needing to directly handle the assignment of pods to nodes themselves. To learn more about this check out the Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal 2926.

I am really curious, why build another project that has similar features as another open source software pixie - https://px.dev/.

Kibana is a good alternative if you can allow storing all your data in Elasticsearch, or you can use all-in-one monitoring tools like pixie https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie

Plenty of paid monitoring solutions out there. Instana is pretty slick. NewRelic has a new open source tool, https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie

Cilium multi-cluster mesh is a bit different, compared to service meshes, and it's L4, so should be fine with eBPF / XDP based routing. From observability standpoint I'd go for pixie - it should work just fine with both linkerd and istio, instead of Hubble, and Cilium's Tetragon was missing policies about 3-4 months ago (needs doublec-hecking if they had introduced any).

Congratulations on the launch, and thank you for choosing an awesome license!

For an unrelated reason, today I was reminded about Pixie (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375170 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687978 and https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie#readme ), which says is also an ebpf kubernetes observability tool, also Apache licensed.

I suspect the difference may be your aspirations to move out of just kubernetes, but I wondered if that's the biggest difference between your project and theirs? Or maybe the C++ versus golang?

eBPF solutions look cool though. I heard of https://px.dev/ which sounds similar to ciliums eBPF mesh recently.