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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.

Cloud-Native Secret Management: OIDC in K8s Explained

External Secrets is the de-facto choice for secrets management in Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies the task of the administrator(s) of the cluster, ensuring only the secrets that are explicitly defined are present and accessible.

It comes with many great features but most important than all is its integration with major cloud providers.

In this blog post you will learn how to deploy it without hard-coded credentials and using only the power of OpenID Connect for trust relationship between services.

Migration From Promtail to Alloy: The What, the Why, and the How

Promtail is (was) the lightweight log collector solution that sends the log over the HTTP to the remote backend. This remote backend is normally Loki but you can choose to send the logs to VictoriaLogs as well.

In this blog post, you will see the newer alternative to Promtail, Grafana Alloy. You will see what it is, why it's a good idea to migrate, and the how-to guide to make the jump with least friction.

How to Setup Preview Environments with FluxCD in Kubernetes

Preview environment is where you see a live state of your changes from your pull request before being merged into the default branch. It gives you a look'n feel of what it would be like if you merged your changes.

Kubernetes on the other hand, is what powers the production setups. But that's not all it can do for you. I have spun up preview environments in Kubernetes with different technologies in the past.

And in this blog post, I will show you how to achive this using FluxCD Operator.

3 Ways to Time Kubernetes Job Duration for Better DevOps

Knowing how long the exucution of jobs take is a crucial part of monitoring and proactive system administration.

Being able to measure, store and query this value over the course of your application lifecycle can help you identify bottlenecks, optimize your infrastructure and improve the overall performance of your application.

In this blog post, you are presented with three methods to achive this, starting from one where you have the access and ability to modify the source code, to the one where you have control over its runtime execution, and finally without control on either & using only the Kube State Metrics.

Read more to find out how.

Ente: Self Host the Google Photos Alternative and Own Your Privacy

In the recent few years, I keep seeing people being more aware of their privacy and taking it into their own hands.

More and more solutions are emerging through the community that address the critical part of our society and personal life; privacy!

In this blog post, I will introduce you to Ente, the Google Photos alternative.

You will see the codes required to deploy the server into a Kubernetes setup and host the frontend using GitHub Pages.

Stick around till the end if that's your cup of tea.

How to Provision a Production-Ready Autopilot GKE Cluster

In this blog post I share my opinioated version of provisioning a Kubernetes cluster in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using nothing but Opentofu.

The principles discussed here are the ones I have learned while dealing with production setups at the same scale.

If you enjoy Kubernetes or want to learn more about GCP, this is for you.

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.