Since I cleaned up the physical rack layout (picture soon!), one thing that’s been bothering me about my home Kubernetes cluster has been the ad-hoc and snowflake nature of the cluster itself. Generally, I’ve been installing/upgrading things with kubectl apply (or occasionally helm install). This is great for experimentation, but is is pretty lousy for…
Getting Ready for Travel
I’m headed to Kubecon NA next week, so I thought I might jot down a bit about the technology I tend to pack in my travel bag, since I’ve been optimizing it over the last few years. I haven’t travelled by plane for 18 months, but prior to COVID I was often travelling to the…
Justifying Hardware Upgrades with Benchmarking
Reflecting how there hasn’t been a lot of content here, I realized one of the things that’s been keeping me from writing is the atrocious cold-start times of WordPress on my kubernetes cluster. I started by trying to optimize WordPress startup times, looking at both the standard apache module and the php-fpm image. Neither of…
Everything Old Is New (Again, and Again…)
This post is inspired by a talk that Kelsey Hightower gave at Serverless Days NYC back in 2018, well before the pandemic. He pointed out that the Lambda / FaaS is pretty much a repeat of the inetd program from the 1970s! I thought this was a pretty awesome idea! At the time, I was…
Building New Habits
So a lot of this early content is probably going to be me throwing things against a wall and figuring out what’s easy to write, what’s important but harder to write, and how to get that writing out. I don’t know if writing is like a muscle that will grow stronger with use, but not practicing doesn’t seem like a strategy to make writing easier.
Looking for a log viewer
I’m currently using a log saving configuration similar to this one (fluent-bit DaemonSets forwarding to a 1-replica StatefulSet collecting the logs to disk), with ngnix for viewing the logs, and logrotate for preventing the logs from completely filling the 40GB persistent volume that I have set up. This mostly works great, except that viewing the…
A hardware view of this site
I’ll do a more comprehensive post later, but I wanted to make sure that media serving was working, and thought I’d share a “making of” picture of the hardware that powers this blog, even though it’s not cleaned up yet. The site is running on a local Kubernetes cluster consisting of: 2 Wyse Dx0Q thin…
Hello, Knative new world!
As you might have guessed, this WordPress site is hosted using https://knative.dev/ (in particular, the serving component). I’ll write up more about how this is done later, but for now, I’m going to post a quick outline of how I got this site working. I started with this Dockerfile: And then I ran the resulting…