Kubernetes

It has been a while.. Something you might have read before on a personal tech blog. My devops professional life at this moment can be summarized as follows: get rid of virtual machines and old platforms and replace them with kubernetes. Platform design Anno 2024 I prefer to build self contained small platforms with internal (hyperconverged) storage versus platforms that have inter dependencies and some traditional central storage solution. The benefit should be clear: when shit really hits the fan (f....

Has been a while since I blogged something. It’s summer time: get your cocktail and stretch yourself on the beach and enjoy the scenery! Usually not my way of spending free time. This week I am enjoying some holiday, though, in Belgian nature (it does exist) with lots of action for the kids in proximity. I made a little trip to Germany to pick up some spare parts for my broken -propeller snapped when the rudder got loose- RC boat....

It is a crazy world we live in. Yesterday we use to test Kubernetes on our trusty virtualization platform. Today we are very busy containerizing workloads, getting rid of virtualization and old infrastructure in the process. Tomorrow we control all infrastructure using the k8s api? I surely hope so: we like to push some change to the infra repository and lean back while the k8s reconciliation loop is configuring infrastructure accordingly....

I heard about the Virtualisation project a while ago but it was until recently, I gave it a spin. I was pleasantly surprised of what’s possible and how well it works. What? Why? It does sound a bit crazy, right? We use to host kubernetes using VMs, or you are still doing that in the public cloud, and now we turn this around? In my opinion kubernetes should be run on bare metal machines for optimal performance: contention with other VMs is non existing obviously and storage is directly connected to k8s....

Kustomize is my favorite tool to manage the bunch of YAML we need to manage operating our clusters and applications. Since it is integrated in kubectl and oc, it is possible to apply a config to your cluster using one command. Or if you like Gitops, ArgoCD can sync your kustomize layer(s) stored in git automatically. A project usually consists of a base layer and a few subsidiary layers that are customized versions of the base....

OKD is the open source equivalent of RedHat’s Openshift product. Openshift is an opiniated patched Kubernetes flavour, marketing itself as more developer oriented and more secure. I always forget what the acronym OKD stands for, so Google it yourself it you like to know. Changing jobs about a year ago, I inherited some long running clusters and the internal work flow using and operating the platforms. I had about 4 years of experience operating and developing on ‘vanilla’ Kubernetes before....

Yesterday I managed to solve a long standing issue with the help of someone from the community. To me a nice example of what can be the hidden costs of running an open source platform with a lot of moving parts. My takes on Openshift and OKD after a year of experience is for some other time. The problem An image says more than a thousand words is the cliché so here we go:...