Website update
If you are wondering what OpenAppStack is, we try to explain it a lot better than before on our website. It even includes images! So please take a look at openappstack.net and let us know if anything is unclear ☺.
Beta test phase
As I write this, we are finishing up the release for our beta test. If you’re interested in trying out OpenAppStack with a small team (2-10 people), you can do so for free and almost without effort. We’ll provide you with a VPS with everything installed for you, you only have to make a few users and you’re ready to go! If you’re interested, please contact us!
If you are not interested right now, you can also sign up for our newsletter and we will let you know when the next test phase starts.
Resource usage improvements
During May, we moved from rke installed Kubernetes to the lightweight Kubernetes alternative k3s. This significantly reduces the resource usage.
Apart from that we found out that some log files were growing indefinitely. We switched to journalctl for as much as possible, and configured sane settings for log rotation.
Security tests
To be sure we do not expose our beta testers to gaping security holes, we ran the kube-bench and kube-hunter automated security tests. The tests did not find real security holes, but did recommend us to change some configurations (which we then did, of course). Before OpenAppStack is released as stable, we will do a human security audit as well.
Local storage provisioner discontinued
In the first year of OpenAppStack, we developed a local storage provisioner for Kubernetes. We wanted to start improving that system this month, but instead found that Rancher had created a similar provisioner, with our improvements already implemented. For that reason we have switched to Rancher’s local path provisioner and discontinued our local storage provisioner. Because of Kubernetes’ modular setup, this was not hard to do and saved us some time.
Backups with Velero
With the beta test in mind, we wanted to make sure we can back up the data on OpenAppStack to a remote system. We are adding Velero to OpenAppStack to manage this. It is a system that can back up the locally saved data, as well as the “cluster state” to any s3-compatible storage. This backup method is almost finished, after which we will release beta version 0.4.0 of OpenAppStack.