Category: Cloud

HowTo: Kleene as a Container Management Platform for FreeBSD

(2025-02-14):
Kleene is a container management (jail manager) platform designed specifically for FreeBSD, bringing familiar concepts from Docker while fully embracing FreeBSDs native tools and philosophy. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Kleene follows the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle, leveraging FreeBSD’s built-in features to simplify application deployment, maintenance, and upgrades without unnecessary complexity or abstraction. By using FreeBSD’s core technologies like jails, ZFS, and PF (Packet Filter), Kleene provides a streamlined way to build, run, and manage containerized applications while maintaining transparency and control. Key functionalities include: Jailed Applications: Running lightweight, isolated environments using ZFS for storage efficiency. Native Networking: Automatically setting up necessary network devices and configurations. Firewall Integration: Managing connectivity securely with FreeBSD’s PF firewall. Unlike some container solutions that introduce heavy layers of abstraction, Kleene stays true to FreeBSD’s “Power to Serve” motto, ensuring users retain full visibility and control over their system. If you’re familiar with .... [read more]

HowTo Create a Kubernetes Cluster in 10 Minutes

(2025-02-04):
Creating and managing a Kubernetes cluster from scratch can be challenging and there’re definitely a way too many possibilities to do so in 2025. With Talos Linux, this can be done in less than 10 minutes! What is Talos Linux? Talos Linux is an operating system built specifically for Kubernetes, focusing on security, immutability, and minimalism. It is designed to work across a variety of environments, including cloud platforms, bare metal servers, and virtualization platforms, providing a versatile solution for modern infrastructure needs. One of its key features is that system management is completely API-driven, eliminating the need for traditional SSH, shell access, or a console interface, which enhances both security and ease of automation. Talos is production-ready, having been used to support some of the largest Kubernetes clusters globally. It is an open-source project developed by the team at Sidero Labs, which is committed to simplifying infrastructure management for .... [read more]

Virtualization in 2024: Market Trends, Open-Source Opportunities, Broadcom’s VMware Shake-Up, and Top Solutions to Watch

(2024-12-10):
The year 2024 marked a turning point for the virtualization industry. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, significant changes to VMware’s licensing model and pricing structure set off a wave of responses across the market. These changes had a profound impact on the virtualization landscape, altering long-held assumptions and forcing enterprises to re-evaluate their strategies. VMware had long been a leader in the virtualization space, with its solutions forming the backbone of countless enterprise data centers. Its platforms, including vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, were considered industry standards, praised for their robustness and feature set. However, post-acquisition, VMware’s licensing and pricing underwent substantial revisions. For many organizations, these changes represented a significant cost increase, leading to concerns about the sustainability of continuing with VMware’s solutions. The updates, while intended to align with Broadcom’s broader enterprise strategy, prompted businesses to reexamine their dependence on proprietary virtualization platforms. This shift created ripple effects, opening .... [read more]

Run Linux Containers on FreeBSD 14 with Podman

(2024-10-06):
In one of my recent blog posts, I shared my journey as a long-time FreeBSD user. I talked about how I’ve been incredibly happy with the system, appreciating its rock-solid stability, flexibility, and performance. But, like every OS, FreeBSD had its gaps, especially when it came to some modern developments – one of which has been a pain point for many of us working with containerized environments: native support for Docker and Podman Linux images. Until recently, this missing functionality made working with containerized applications a bit of a challenge. Let me explain why that’s changed and how FreeBSD 14 has finally caught up to the container party. The Old Way: bhyve Linux VMs For a long time, one of the workarounds for running Linux containers on FreeBSD was to spin up a Linux VM using bhyve, FreeBSD’s native hypervisor. While bhyve is fantastic in its own right (fast, lightweight, .... [read more]

Harvester - A More Modern Alternative to Proxmox As a HCI

(2024-06-25):
After Broadcom increased the license fees, other virtualization alternatives become very popular. While I previously already evaluated various virtualization platforms, including Proxmox, as well as other solutions that are based on FreeBSD, such as bhyve-webadmin (BVCP), and ClonOS there are of course also several other ones and it is worth noting another noteworthy option in the landscape of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Harvester is an innovative, open-source HCI platform that is built atop of Kubernetes, offering a cloud-native approach to infrastructure management. It is tailored for operators who are in search of an open-source HCI solution that can seamlessly integrate with their existing systems. Harvester is engineered to be deployed directly on bare metal servers, where it provides a combination of virtualization and distributed storage functionalities. This solution is not limited to managing traditional virtual machines, it also embraces the containerization trend by facilitating containerized workloads through its integration with Rancher. .... [read more]

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