Traditional approaches to creating and maintaining workloads in the enterprise often include contributions from many teams and individuals. They also include a combination of manual and scripted activities. I sometimes refer to this as an assembly line. The workloads that come off the assembly line, like cars, have odometers and require regular maintenance. Others refer… Continue reading
Istio Ingress vs. Kubernetes Ingress
For years I have appreciated the clean and simple way Kubernetes approached Ingress into container workloads. The idea of an IngressController that dynamically reconfigures itself based on the current state of Ingress resources seemed very clean and easy to understand. Istio, on the other hand, felt more confusing, so I set out to correlate what… Continue reading
Kubernetes on the cheap
UPDATE: Beginning in June, 2020, GKE will charge for the control plane. This means the design below will jump from $5/month to nearly $80/month. I was recently inspired by a post claiming it was possible to run kubernetes on Google for $5 per month. One reason I have been shy to jump all in with… Continue reading
Using and troubleshooting etcd in kubernetes
etcd, https://coreos.com/etcd/, is a distributed key/value store and contains all details about a kubernetes cluster, such as resources and their states. How etcd is installed I install kubernetes, and etcd along with it, using kubespray https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kubespray Interacting with etcd etcd runs as a container. The startup script used by systemctl is /usr/local/bin/etcd, which has the… Continue reading
Software Testing
I frequently hear people talk about unit tests when they actually mean something else. In some cases, I would think it was pedantic to argue about the specific meaning of a term like unittest, but in this case I think it often works against the Software Developer to use the term incorrectly. Below I provide… Continue reading
Self-service access control in kubernetes
One of the most significant benefits of containers is that they empower a software engineer to explore technologies and infrastructure decisions quickly. Containers make it possible for a developer to try on new technologies and platforms and consider infrastructure decisions without a long approval and requisition process. It also reduces cost significantly, since many containers… Continue reading
Let’s Encrypt quicker start
In spite of the popularity of Let’s Encrypt for generating free SSL/TLS certificates, I think their getting started page stinks. In case you feel the same way, I’ll try to give you a real quick start that will get you to your first certificate. Certificate Authority Let me point out that anyone with Linux (or… Continue reading
Software Development and batch size
I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about batch size and how the choice of batch size impacts software development and release processes. Today I went looking for some other perspectives and I found this post about optimization on the IBM website. The author provides a good summary of the benefits available by decreasing… Continue reading
Generate TLS Secret for kubernetes
Often in development or when working on proofs of concept (PoC), I need working SSL to protect an endpoint. If I controlled the domain, I would use Lets Encrypt to generate a certificate. When I don’t control the domain, I often use self signed certificates. Below is how I create them and then use them… Continue reading
Kubernetes bootcamp
Introduction Kubernetes (also written k8s) is a powerful container orchestration platform that works with Docker. This first video provides a high level explanation of how kubernetes differs from traditional application deployment and infrastructure management. Overview A kubernetes cluster is made up of masters and nodes. The masters are responsible for orchestration and the nodes host… Continue reading