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Nov 2023 Release

Rightsizing exercises with Cost Explorer

As organizations increase their K8s footprint and onboard more applications, it becomes extremely critical to have an unified (cross account, cross cloud) view of resource utilization metrics across clusters. Without this, organizations will be running blind to their K8s cost structure and it will be impossible to operate their infrastructure in a cost effective manner.

A recent release introduced a new integrated capability within the platform referred to as "Cost Explorer". This capability provides organizations with necessary information to effectively undertake "cluster rightsizing" and "application rightsizing" exercises.

Upstream Kubernetes on RHEL 9 using Rafay

Our recent release update adds support for a number of new features and enhancements. This blog is focused on support for Upstream Kubernetes on nodes based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) v9.2 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) v9.1. Both new cluster provisioning and in-place upgrades of Kubernetes clusters are supported for lifecycle management.

RHEL 9.2

Upstream Kubernetes v1.27 and v1.28 on VMware vSphere

Our recent release update to our Preview environment adds support for a number of new features and enhancements. We will write about these in separate blogs. This blog is focused on support for lifecycle management of upstream Kubernetes v1.27 and v1.28 on VMware vSphere

Both new cluster provisioning and in-place upgrades of existing clusters are supported. As with most Kubernetes releases, this version also deprecates and removes a number of features. To ensure there is zero impact to our customers, we have made sure that every feature in the Rafay Kubernetes Management Platform has been validated on this Kubernetes version. This will be promoted from Preview to Production in a few days and will be made available to all customers.

Kubernetes Release

IPv6 Only Amazon EKS Clusters using Rafay

As the demand for IP addresses continues to grow, the Internet is rapidly running out of available IPv4 addresses. This has led to the adoption of IPv6, which provides a much larger pool of IP addresses. By using IPv6, organizations can ensure that they have enough IP addresses for their containerized applications, without running into address exhaustion issues.

Our most recent release to our Preview environment adds support for the creation of IPv6 Only Amazon EKS Clusters. This update streamlines the process of establishing Amazon EKS clusters with IPv6 only configuration, making it easier for you to harness the advantages of IPv6 networking without dealing with complexities.

Implementing Chargeback/Showback for multi-tenant clusters

As organizations embrace multi-tenancy i.e. share clusters among applications/teams to reduce cluster sprawl and spend, it is imperative that granular resource utilization metrics are collected and aggregated from their clusters. Tracking and reporting costs on a per application/team basis (referred to as chargeback/showback) is essential for a number of reasons including:

  • Billing internal teams/applications (their cost center IDs) based on their consumption
  • Gaining visibility into the cost structure to determine inefficiencies and drive cost optimization exercises
  • Forecasting future spend

Rafay's integrated Cost Management solution makes it extremely simple for customers to standardize collection of metrics in a consistent manner across clusters (cloud, on-premise) and implement chargeback/showback models.