Hello, I am Junyu Liu (GitHub: iyear), currently a sophomore majoring in software engineering. In this blog post, I will share my experiences as a Linux Foundation Mentorship mentee: from applying for the project to becoming part of the community.

In the spring of 2023, I was accepted as a CNCF student under the KubeVela project through LFX Mentorship. In this project, I am responsible for developing a CUE code and documentation generator based on Golang from scratch, laying the foundation for the infrastructure part of KubeVela's future extensibility.

ChatGPT is taking the tech industry by storm, thanks to its unparalleled natural language processing capabilities. As a powerful AI language model, it has the ability to understand and generate human-like responses, revolutionizing communication in various industries. From streamlining customer service chatbots to enabling seamless language translation tools, ChatGPT has already proved its mettle in creating innovative solutions that improve efficiency and user experience.

Now the question is, can we leverage ChatGPT to transform the way we deliver applications? With the integration of ChatGPT into DevOps workflows, we are witnessing the possible emergence of a new era of automation called PromptOps. This advancement in AIOps technology is revolutionizing the way businesses operate, allowing for faster and more efficient application delivery.

In this article, we will explore how to integrate ChatGPT into your DevOps workflow to deliver applications.

The KubeVela 1.7 version has been officially released for some time, during which KubeVela has been officially promoted to a CNCF incubation project, marking a new milestone. KubeVela 1.7 itself is also a turning point because KubeVela has been focusing on the design of an extensible system from the beginning, and the demand for the core functionality of controllers has gradually converged, freeing up more resources to focus on user experience, ease of use, and performance. In this article, we will focus on highlighting the prominent features of version 1.7, such as workload takeover and performance optimization.

Originally post in CNCF.

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept KubeVela as a CNCF incubating project.

KubeVela is an application delivery engine built with the Kubernetes control plane that makes deploying and operating applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments easier, faster, and more reliable. KubeVela can orchestrate, deploy, and operate application components and cloud resources with a workflow-based application delivery model. The application delivery abstraction of KubeVela is powered by the Open Application Model (OAM).

Since Open Application Model invented in 2020, KubeVela has experienced tens of version changes and evolves advanced features towards modern application delivery. Recently, KubeVela has proposed to become a CNCF incubation project and delivered several public talks in the community. As a memorandum, this article will look back into the starting points and give a comprehensive introduction to the state of KubeVela in 2022.

What is KubeVela?

KubeVela is a modern software platform that makes delivering and operating applications across today's hybrid, multi-cloud environments easier, faster and more reliable. It has three main features:

• Infrastructure agnotic: KubeVela is able to deploy your cloud-native application into various destinations, such as Kubernetes multi-clusters, cloud provider runtimes (like Alibaba Cloud, AWS or Azure) and edge devices.
• Programmable: KubeVela has abstraction layers for modeling applications and delivery process. The abstraction layers allow users to use programmable ways to build higher level reusable modules for application delivery and integrate arbitrary third-party projects (like FluxCD, Crossplane, Istio, Prometheus) in the KubeVela system.
• Application-centric: There are rich tools and eco-systems designed around the KubeVela applications, which add extra capabilities for deliverying and operating the applications, including CLI, UI, GitOps, Observability, etc.

KubeVela cares the whole lifecycle of the applications, including both the Day-1 Delivery and the Day-2 Operating stages. It is able to connect with a wide range of Continuous Integration tools, like Jenkins or GitLab CI, and help users deliver and operate applications across hybrid environments.

Application Delivery on Kubernetes​

The cloud-native landscape is formed by a fast-growing ecosystem of tools with the aim of improving the development of modern applications in a cloud environment. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard to deploy enterprise workloads by improving development speed, and accommodating the needs of a dynamic environment.

Kubernetes offers a comprehensive set of entities that enables any potential application to be deployed into it, independent of its complexity. This however has a significant impact from the point of view of its adoption. Kubernetes is becoming as complex as it is powerful, and that translates into a steep learning curve for newcomers into the ecosystem. Thus, this has generated a new trend focused on providing developers with tools that improve their day-to-day activities without losing the underlying capabilities of the underlying system.

The community has released the new milestone release v1.6 of KubeVela during the 2022 Apsara Conference. This release is a qualitative change in KubeVela from application delivery to application management. It also creates a precedent in the industry to build an application platform with delivery and management integrated based on a extensible model.

KubeVela 1.5 was released recently. This release brings more convenient application delivery capabilities to the community, including system observability, CloudShell terminals that move the Vela CLI to the browser, enhanced canary releases, and optimized multi-environment application delivery workflows. It also improved KubeVela's high extensibility as an application delivery platform. The community has started to promote the project to the CNCF Incubation stage. It has absorbed the practice sharing of multiple benchmark users in many community meetings, which proves the community's healthy development. The project is now mature to some extent, and its adoption has made periodical achievements, thanks to the contributions of more than 200 developers in the community.

You may have learned from this blog that we can use vela to manage cloud resources (like s3 bucket, AWS EIP and so on) via the terraform plugin. We can create an application which contains some cloud resource components and this application will generate these cloud resources, then we can use vela to manage them.

Sometimes we already have some Terraform cloud resources which may be created and managed by the Terraform binary or something else. In order to have the benefits of using KubeVela to manage the cloud resources or just maintain consistency in the way you manage cloud resources, we may want to import these existing Terraform cloud resources into KubeVela and use vela to manage them. But if we just create an application which describes these cloud resources, the cloud resources will be recreated and may lead to errors. To fix this problem, we made a simple backup_restore tool. This blog will show you how to use the backup_restore tool to import your existing Terraform cloud resources into KubeVela.

If you're looking for something to glue Terraform ecosystem with the Kubernetes world, congratulations! You're getting exactly what you want in this blog.

We will introduce how to integrate terraform modules into KubeVela by fixing a real world problem -- "Fixing the Developer Experience of Kubernetes Port Forwarding" inspired by article from Alex Ellis.

In general, this article will be divided into two parts:

• Part.1 will introduce how to glue Terraform with KubeVela, it needs some basic knowledge of both Terraform and KubeVela. You can just skip this part if you don't want to extend KubeVela as a Developer.
• Part.2 will introduce how KubeVela can 1) provision a Cloud ECS instance by KubeVela with public IP; 2) Use the ECS instance as a tunnel sever to provide public access for any container service within an intranet environment.

OK, let's go!