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Kubernetes

Kubernetes The Hard Way

You might've solved this challenge way sooner than I attempted it. Still, I always wanted to go through the process as it has many angles and learning the details intrigues me.

This version, however, does not use any cloud provider. Specifically, the things I am using differently from the original challenge are:

  • Vagrant & VirtualBox: For the nodes of the cluster
  • Ansible: For configuring everything until the cluster is ready
  • Cilium: For the network CNI and as a replacement for the kube-proxy

So, here is my story and how I solved the famous Kubernetes The Hard Way by the great Kelsey Hightower. Stick around if you're interested in the details.

Ory Keto: Authorization and Access Control as a Service

Internet has come a long way since its inception. The first few years might have been a new adventure for those building web applications, but in the modern day software development and in 2024, you rarely stop to question most of the common practices around the industry.

One of the most frequent requirement for any application is to have some sort of access control policy. The most used approach in today's world is the use of RBAC. It makes a lot of sense to treat a group of one or multiple identities of a system the same way and grant or deny them a specific set of permissions.

Ory Keto comes with all the batteries included. It provides a fearless authorization platform, friendly API for developers, and scalable stateless application.

If you're creating an application over HTTP these days, chances are, Ory Keto has a lot to offer you. Stick around till the end to find out how.

How to Set Up Preview Environments for Pull Requests

Have you ever been frustrated at long merge queues? Did you ever wish there was a better and faster way to get feedback on your code changes and approval from your team members?

You may have also been on the other side of the table, reviewing pull requests and wishing there was a better way to actually test the revisions before approving it; giving you a sense of what it would feel and look like if it were to merge.

Netlify and other frontend hosting services have spoiled us with the ability to spin up a live instance of the application for each pull request for static files. But what about backend applications? How can we achieve the same and deploy our backend for every new proposed change in pull requests?

In this blog post, we will explore how to set up preview environments for each pull request using GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. This guide includes spinning up the application as a live instance with an internet accessible URL to preview and verify the changes before they find their way into the main trunk.

Unlocking the Power of VictoriaMetrics: A Prometheus Alternative

One of the main tasks of an operations team in any organization is to provide a solid and robust monitoring solution for the platform, the application, and the entire infrastructure.

Monitoring enables business owners to understand how their applications behave in a production setup, how to optimize it, and how to proactively fine-tune & forecast the future growth of the platform.

In this blog post, we will explore what Victoria Metrics has to offer, how to set it up and configure it to work as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus and a datastore for Grafana.

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity and Access Proxy Server

Ory has a great ecosystem of products when it comes to authentication and authorization. Ory Oathkeeper is an stateless Identity and Access Proxy server.

It is capable of acting as a reverse-proxy as well as a decision maker and policy enforcer for other proxy servers.

In today's application development world, if you're operating on HTTP layer, Ory Oathkeeper has a lot to offer to you.

Stick around to find out how.

Ory Kratos: Headless Authentication, Identity and User Management

Authentication flows are quite common in the modern day software development. What we want from one authentication has a lot of overlapping funcionality with what our other applications need. Even across different industries, you can still see the same patterns apply when it comes to Identity and User Management.

Ory Kratos solves all that user management under one umbrella of identity server, providing a clean headless API that you can ship your own UI with. It empowers you to customize the frontend, while preserving the ever-common backend that is backed by the robust SQL database.

In this blog post, we will cover the introduction and basics of Ory Kratos, as well as the steps and guides to write your integration client.

If you've always wanted to stop reinventing the wheel, reduce code duplication and to follow security best practices, then Ory Kratos and this blog post is for you!

GitOps Continuous Deployment: FluxCD Advanced CRDs

FluxCD is a powerful ecosystem of GitOps operators that can be enabled on-demand as per the requirement of your environment. It enables you to opt-in for the features you need and to disable the ones you don't.

As the complexity and requirement of your environment grows, so does the need for extra tooling to cover the implementation of the features you need.

FluxCD comes with more than just the support for Kustomization and HelmRelease. With FluxCD, you can also manage your Docker images as new versions get built. You can also get notified of the events that happen on your behalf by the FluxCD operators.

Stick till the end to see how you can take your Kubernetes cluster to the next level using advanced FluxCD CRDs.

cert-manager: All-in-One Kubernetes TLS Certificate Manager

Kubernetes is a great orchestration tool for managing your applications and all its dependencies. However, it comes with an extensible architecture and with an unopinionated approach to many of the day-to-day operational tasks.

One of these tasks is the management of TLS certificates. This includes issuing as well as renewing certificates from a trusted Certificate Authority. This CA may be a public internet-facing application or an internal service that needs encrypted communication between parties.

In this post, we will introduce the industry de-facto tool of choice for managing certificates in Kubernetes: cert-manager. We will walk you through the installation of the operator, configuring the issuer(s), and receiving a TLS certificate as a Kubernetes Secret for the Ingress or Gateway of your application.

Finally, we will create the Gateway CRD and expose an application securely over HTTPS to the internet.

If that gets you excited, hop on and let's get started!