Crossword Puzzles, Kubernetes and CI/CD

Read the first part of our series on Linux.com: Set Up a CI/CD Pipeline with Kubernetes.

What’s an eight letter word that starts with K and is the name of a powerful container orchestration tool?

If you just shouted out Kubernetes (or if you were curious about the answer), then you’re ready to tackle the Kenzan Kr8sswordz Puzzle.

The Kr8sswords Puzzle is a crossword puzzle app that runs in pods on Kubernetes. It takes advantage of a full CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins that also runs in a pod, automating the entire build-and-deploy process. And it includes a bunch of other cool components that we don’t want to spoil for you because it’s much more fun to boot up the app yourself and see the different pieces in action. (Okay, here’s a hint: React frontend, Etcd caching, and MongoDB persistence.)

Kenzan designed the app as a four part blog series that is launching on Linux.com today. Part 1 kicks things off by walking you through setting up a local Kubernetes development environment. Each weekly blog post will add components to show the Kr8sswordz Puzzle in action, how to spin up many pod instances for a load test, and how you can easily incorporate Kubernetes into a CI/CD pipeline.

The Kr8sswords Puzzle app was a lot of fun to pull together. We hope you have just as much fun building it out as the blog series goes on.

Kenzan is a family, and we would like to give a shout out to the many folks that made the app and blog series possible:

Developers
Chad Moon, Platform Engineer
Sean Korten, Platform Lead Engineer
Evan Yeager, Technical Architect
Geiser Menoia, Back End Developer
Justin Tomlinson, Director of Engineering
Marie Schmidt, Front End Developer
Scott Pullano, Director of Engineering
Rona Kilmer, Director of Engineering

Tech Writers
Ryan Daugherty
Mark Anthony

Testers
Oscar Santamaria
Matthew Gardner
Ben Sawyer
PJ Pannoni
Robin Morrison
Matt Poirier

Leadership
Elana Krasner
Nick Wester
Craig Martin