Acorn Blog
Deploying Acorn on an Air-gapped Kubernetes Cluster using Harbor
This is the third part in a series on selecting a private container registry. In the first part of the series we looked at different options for private container registries. The second part discussed best practices for deploying Harbor as a private registry. In this...
Deploying Harbor as a Private Registry – Part 2
Setting Up and Configuring Harbor: Your Guide to Establishing a Secure Private Registry This is the second part in a series on selecting a private container registry. In the first part of the series we looked at different options for private container registries. In...
What’s New in Acorn v0.8
Today we're announcing the release of Acorn v0.8. In addition to loads of bug fixes, enhancements, and architectural changes, we're introducing several exciting features. Read on to learn more! More control over your acorns with jobs Now you can list and restart jobs...
Selecting a Private Container Registry in 2023 – Part 1
This is the first part in a three part series on selecting and deploying a Private Container Registry. In this post, we'll be looking at why organizations require private registries, and some of the leading options available today. As enterprises increasingly adopt...
Bringing Exoscale Managed Databases to the Voting App as an Acorn Service
The Service feature introduced in Acorn 0.7.0 allows developers to easily provision cloud components such as databases or message queues so applications can utilize them. In previous articles we illustrated Acorn Services with MongoDB Atlas and NGS / NATS. Also, as we...
Analyze Your Prometheus Alerts with Robusta and ChatGPT
Introduction If you have a Kubernetes cluster that uses Prometheus for monitoring, at some point, you must have felt overwhelmed by the number of alerts you get. If you are monitoring multiple clusters, the feeling would have been even stronger. In many cases, the...
Building a Service Acorn for NATS using NGS by Synadia
When Acorn 0.7 released earlier this month, it introduced a new feature called Service Acorns, which allows developers to easily provision instances of cloud components (database, message queues, …) so applications can consume them. If you're not familiar with Service...
Taking Nextcloud Public: Exposing your Home Lab to the Internet with Cloudflare
Introduction This is a new addition to our series of posts on building a Kubernetes Home Lab. In this article we focus on how to expose your Kubernetes home lab to the internet. If you’re just getting started, you can start with the first post, or find all of the...
Creating an Acorn Service for MongoDB Atlas
Last week, Acorn 0.7 introduced the new Acorn Services functionality which allows developers to easily provision cloud components such as databases or message queues so applications can utilize them. The idea behind Acorn Services is that anyone can create services...
What’s New in Acorn 0.7
Today we released Acorn 0.7, our biggest release yet, and it's packed with features, enhancements, and bug fixes. The most exciting feature is support for nested and service acorns. Service acorns open up a world of external cloud integrations to your applications...
Introducing Acorn Services and Nested Acorns
Applications today are typically a composition of microservices, storage, databases, and APIs. Describing an application's runtime dependencies typically involves infrastructure provisioning like Terraform and/or complex YAML. In Acorn 0.7, which we released today, we...
DIY Cloud Storage: Running Nextcloud on a Kubernetes Home Lab
Want to back up your files & photos to your own cloud service? Learn how to do that using Nextcloud.
Deploying and Scaling a PyTorch Chatbot Model with Kubernetes, Cog and Acorn
Deploying and Scaling Containerized Machine Learning Models – Part 4 This four-part series focuses on leveraging Kubernetes, Cog and Acorn frameworks to package, deploy, and scale machine learning models in cloud native environments. Part 1 introduces Cog as the...
Deploying and Scaling TensorFlow Vision AI Models on Kubernetes
Deploying and Scaling Containerized Machine Learning Models – Part 3 This four-part series focuses on leveraging Cog and Acorn frameworks to package, deploy, and scale machine learning models in cloud native environments. Part 1 introduces Cog as the framework for...
Using Cog and Acorn to Deploy and Scale Machine Learning Models on Kubernetes
Deploying and Scaling Containerized Machine Learning Models – Part 2 This four-part series focuses on leveraging Cog and Acorn frameworks to package, deploy, and scale machine learning models in cloud native environments. Part 1 introduces Cog as the framework for...
Introducing Cog and Containerizing Machine Learning Models
Deploying and Scaling Containerized Machine Learning Models - Part 1 This four-part series focuses on leveraging Cog and Acorn frameworks to package, deploy, and scale machine learning models in cloud native environments. Part 1 introduces Cog as the framework for...
Scaling DevOps at the Edge with Kubernetes, Acorn and GitOps – Part 2
Configuring Continuous Deployment for Acorn Applications through GitOps In the last tutorial, we explored how to use Flux to deploy the Acorn framework at scale on multiple Kubernetes clusters running at the edge. Continuing the series, I will walk you through the...
Scaling DevOps at the Edge with Kubernetes, Acorn and GitOps – Part 1
Acorn is a lightweight deployment framework that makes developers productive and efficient. When organizations adopt Acorn as the standard platform to run microservices, they have a consistent mechanism for packaging and deploying workloads. With edge computing...
Microservices are Dead, Long Live the Monolith
Have you heard the news? Amazon Prime Video has migrated away from microservices to a monolith! Surely if Amazon engineering is eschewing microservices and serverless architectures, we all should do the same and return to the bygone utopia that is the monolith. But is...
Creating an Application Dashboard for your Home Lab
Don’t be overwhelmed with the increasing number of application links in your home lab. Host an application dashboard make all the links to your applications available on all of your devices easily.
Hosting the Pi-Hole Ad-Blocker on My Kubernetes Home Lab
Annoyed with the internet ads? Host a local DNS ad-blocker on your home lab to block ads on all the devices in your home network.
Hosting Plex Media Server on My Home Lab Using Docker and Acorn
In this fourth post on the home lab series we cover hosting Plex media server on home lab. It also talks about how to create partitions on your storage disk, mount it & how to share it as an NFS directory.
Building the Software Stack for My Kubernetes Home Lab
In this third post on home labs I install OS on the machines in my home lab. I also install K3s cluster on it making it ready to host applications.
Hands-on Training: Developing with Acorn – May 4, 2023
Join us for a hands-on training to learn all about using Acorn to build and deploy microservices. Acorn makes it simple to write, build and deploy applications that can easily be run against any Kubernetes cluster. In this session, Acorn senior engineer Bill Maxwell...
Hardware Configuration and Networking Setup for My Home Lab
In this post I assemble all the hardware components for the machines in my home lab. I also configure my home network to separate them from other devices in my home for security purposes.
Building a Kubernetes Home Lab from the Ground Up
I recently came across the concept of Home Lab & I thought of giving it a try. Follow along as I learn what it is, things to consider while setting it up & the way I set up my Home Lab.
Adding a custom domain and TLS certificates to the VotingApp
This is the fifth part in a series focused on teaching the fundamentals of building and developing applications using Acorn. In the previous step we detailed how to connect a CI/CD pipeline to Acorn. In this new post we will show how to expose the application using...
What’s New in Acorn v0.6.0
That's right, version 0.6.0 of Acorn is here and it has some great features and enhancements. Headlining this release are features to simplify the scheduling and allocation of workloads and volumes. ComputeClass for CPU and Memory Have you ever been tripped up by...
Implementing a CICD pipeline for the VotingApp
This is the fourth part in a series focused on teaching the fundamentals of building and developing applications using Acorn. In the previous step we introduced Acorn development mode, a feature which allows to develop an application in an interactive and iterative...
Constraining Memory in Acorn
In our most recent update of Acorn, v0.5.0, we added the ability to constrain memory. This is a great way of defining how much memory you would like allocated to your application. Constraining the amount of resources is an important concept for administrators of an...
Getting Started with Acorn Workshop
When I discovered Acorn a few months ago, I first wrote a blog post which details how to use it to specify, run, package, and distribute a microservice application. Then I started a series of posts which define the use of Acorn in a more progressive way. Creating a...
Automated upgrades of Kubernetes applications with Acorn
Learn how Acorn can auto upgrade your running applications on newer releases of your application.
What’s New in v0.5.0
Acorn’s team has been hard at work to bring a collection of new features to Acorn as part of our first release of 2023. With the release of v0.5.0 we have a couple of features we’re particularly excited about and want to highlight for you in this blog post. We've...
Rapid code iteration with Acorn development mode
This is the fourth part in a series focused on teaching the fundamentals of building and developing applications using Acorn. In the previous post of this series we enhanced the Acornfile of the VotingApp defining volumes for both db and redis containers. In this post...
Adding Acorn volumes in the VotingApp
This is the third post in a series that uses the Docker Voting app to showcase how to use Acorn. in the previous post of the series we modified the Acornfile of the VotingApp adding Acorn secrets inside of it. In this step we will add a storage definition for both...
Linking Acorn Apps with Azure Database for PostgreSQL
This tutorial continues the series on running Acorn apps in Azure AKS. In the last part, we explored how to secure Gitea through a TLS-enabled endpoint. In this part, I will extend the scenario to connect the stateless Gitea frontend with Azure Database for...
Deploying Stateful Web Apps with Acorn
This is the first in a series of articles on using Acorn with Azure AKS. Part one explains how to get started building out an Acorn environment on Azure AKS, and part two explains how to use TLS certificates to secure endpoints. Gitea is a popular open source and...
Securing Acorn App Endpoints with TLS Certificates
This is the second in a series of articles on using Acorn with Azure AKS. Part one explains how to get started with Acorn on Azure, and part three discusses running stateful workloads. Acorn applications can publish ports for HTTP access. For each published port,...
Converting Docker Compose files to Acornfiles
Get started with Acorn today by converting your existing Docker Compose files to Acornfiles. This article covers how you can convert your Docker Compose files into Acornfiles to run them with Acorn on Kubernetes.
Using Acorn secrets in the Voting App
In the previous article of the series we described the Voting App in an Acornfile and ran it in a demo cluster. As a reminder, we ended up with the following Acornfile: Specification of the VotingApp in a simple Acornfile If you look at how the username and password...
What’s New in v0.4.0
Once again, we're excited to announce a new release of Acorn, packed with new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Let's jump right into what this release has to offer. Let's Encrypt Certificates for Custom Domains In our last release, we introduced turnkey TLS...
Getting Started with Acorn and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
This is the first in a series of articles on using Acorn with Azure AKS. Part two explains how to use TLS certificates to secure endpoints, and part three discusses running stateful workloads. Starting from Acorn 0.3, you can install the Acorn framework, deploy Acorn...
Building an Acorn Development Environment with Multipass and K3s
Acorn can be installed in environments such as Docker Desktop, Minikube, or MicroK8s running on a developer workstation. There are instances where you may want to emulate a multi-node cluster that mimics the production environment to deploy and test Acorn apps. ...
Introducing Acorn VS Code Extension
After Acorn launched earlier this year, our community quickly asked for a Visual Studio Code extension. We set out to make working with Acorn without leaving VS Code possible. After hearing that feedback, we are excited to announce our first published release of the...
Building Kubernetes Applications with Acorn
Acorn lets you easily build containerized application for Kubernetes without needing to dive into Kubernetes knowledge base. Learn how you can get started with Acorn & get the benefits of Kubernetes features within minutes.
Deploying the Voting App with Acorn
In this series of articles we will use a sample microservice application and show how we can build / run / package and distribute it using Acorn. The current article (first in the series) will introduce our demo application and show how it can be defined and run using...
Introducing Acorn Encrypted Secrets
Automating deployments always has friction when it comes to secrets management. GitOps, the Kubernetes way of automating deployments, is driven by changes to files in a Git repository containing all of the manifests. But what about secrets? When it comes to passwords,...
Consuming Vault Secrets in Acorn Apps
Intro In this post I will discuss one of the many ways to use Hashicorp's Vault in a Kubernetes environment with Acorn. Vault is a very popular tool used to secure, store, and tightly control access to passwords and other sensitive data. Vault can be used on premise...
What’s new in v0.3.0
Just over a month ago we released v0.2.0 of Acorn and today we are announcing v0.3.0. If you haven't guessed, we're targeting a monthly release cycle. You can check out the full release notes or read on for the feature highlights of the release. Encrypting and...
What’s new in v0.2.0
Today we released v0.2.0 of Acorn. You can check it out here or just follow our installation guide to get the latest version. Our initial release was one month ago. Since then, we've made five v0.1.x patch releases to address minor bugs and improvements, but v0.2.0...
Unlocking Acorn’s Native Secret Management
Running apps in production always comes with the need for a database password, api key, or private key. It has always been a challenge to securely deliver sensitive information to the application. Acorn provides a flexible way to accommodate getting secrets to your...
Getting Started with Acorn and Amazon EKS
This guide will help you to deploy a sample application using Acorn on top of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). At the end of this tutorial, you will have a running app that you can manage using Acorn CLI. Prerequisites Before starting this tutorial, you...
Using Acorn in Developer Mode to Build a Python Web App
How we’re using Acorn here at Acorn Labs
At Acorn Labs, we believe in eating our own dogfood and we've been doing it since our very first release. To support our DNS feature, we've deployed a publicly accessible service to create and manage DNS entries for Acorn applications. This service is a great use-case...
Getting started with Acorn and WordPress
Intro WordPress is one of the most popular CMS systems on the internet, so this is the obligatory running WordPress with Acorn blog. In this post we are going to walk through building an Acorn image that has mariadb and wordpress and running it on a Kubernetes...
Introducing Acorn
Today I’d like to announce Acorn, an application packaging and deployment framework for Kubernetes. Acorn aims to complete the original vision of containers enabled by Docker and Kubernetes. When I jumped on the Docker bandwagon nine years ago my favorite thing was...