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KubeFox is an SDK, platform and infrastructure to enable rapid construction and deployment of secure and robust applications for Kubernetes, and which drastically reduces the burden of DevOps.

Consider the following list:

  • Virtual environments
  • Zero Trust
  • Versioned deployments
  • Federated metrics, tracing, logging, auditing, and monitoring – out of the box

Environments transform into lightweight virtual constructs, still possessing the positive attributes that we expect of them, but shedding undesirable traits that make them unwieldy. Zero Trust is not something that requires thousands of dollars and large, high caliber DevOps teams - it’s an intrinsic property of a KubeFox-developed system. Multiple versions of applications can be run side-by-side, facilitating Canary and Blue/Green deployments and drastically simplifying the software lifecycle. Developers are freed to rapidly evolve and advance applications, without jumping through complex configuration hoops or waiting in line for resources.

With minimal configuration, KubeFox yields advanced telemetry - including federated, span-based logs, metrics and traces - on user-developed components, and on a by-component and component-to-component basis. KubeFox orchestrates unheard of efficiencies, yielding provisioning efficiencies and driving down costs. Sound intriguing? Read on…

Challenges in Kubernetes

It’s one thing but it’s a really big thing: the lifecycle of software in the Kubernetes world is fraught with complexity and requires continual analysis and realignment. And as a company and its teams grow, those difficulties increase disproportionately.

That analysis is performed by the scarcest and one of the most expensive teams in any company: DevOps. DevOps needs to address a variety of overlapping goals and deal with sometimes competing objectives:

  • Providing a frictionless workflow to engineering, to enable rapid prototyping and iterations
  • Application security, with the clear objective being zero trust
  • Application monitoring, testing and debugging
  • What tools will be chosen, how they’ll be implemented, provisioned, monitored and supported
  • Microservice and Pod proliferation - and resultant and continuous increases in costly resources (compute, memory, storage)
  • Providing for n - 1, n and n + 1 versions in multiple environments - a challenge magnified in dev, where the need to provide isolation results in drastic increases in resource demands
  • Dealing with multiple vendors on a discrete basis for licenses, support contracts, maintenance and upgrades

… and this is just the tip of the iceberg

Why KubeFox

KubeFox is involved in the areas of the software lifecycle that inflict the greatest pain on engineering and DevOps teams. That starts with CI/CD. CI/CD pipelines are so named because they truly are pipelines, complete with a host of products and capabilities that spawn the creation of internal cottage industries with dedicated staff to manage them.

At a high level, they’re all some variation of Figure 1 below:

Figure 1 - High Level Deployment Workflow

KubeFox automates significant parts of this workflow.

In KubeFox, you build and deploy Apps, just as you do today. Applications are collections of Components. Components can be microservices or functions. When an application is deployed, KubeFox determines what components have changed and distills the deployment to only those components that are unique - either new versions of existing components or new components.

Building applications with KubeFox yields a host of benefits in the software lifecycle:

  • The application lifecycle is focused on the Application component development and interaction – not on associated DevOps tasks and logistics.
  • A primary goal of KubeFox is to enable engineering teams to interact with Kubernetes in an as frictionless a manner as possible. Developers can rapidly prototype new concepts, enhance existing applications, and test their work.
  • It is not incumbent on developers or QA / Release teams to manually ascertain whether a component has changed and manage component compatibility. KubeFox automatically deploys the correct versions of components and distills deployments to only those components that are unique.
  • Different versions of the same application can coexist on the same cluster – without incurring the overhead and resource drain of needlessly duplicated unchanged components.
  • Sophisticated deployments like Canary and Blue/Green are facilitated with KubeFox. You can arrange for a subdomain for canary testing for early adopters, and run the advanced version of the application side-by-side with the current version.
  • KubeFox dynamically shapes traffic at runtime, so shifting from one application version to another is lightswitch quick.
  • Environments are virtual constructs, enabling you (and your developers) to rapidly spool up and tear down isolated environments for teams or even individual developers.
  • Configuration is abstracted from environment, yielding great flexibility and fostering rapid engineering.
  • Span-based federated telemetry (logs, metrics, traces) is immediately available, enabling you to view context-relevant application and component behavior.
  • Your applications are zero trust from the beginning.

In the following sections, we’ll delve more deeply into some of KubeFox’s concepts and capabilities.

Next Steps

If you want to jump straight in, go to the Quickstart. It's also worthwhile to review the docs, starting with Concepts.

We welcome your feedback and involvement!