leader

One Simple Trick to 10X your Tech Team

Your job as a leader of technical people is to make sure that your people are equipped to handle their work. You make sure they have the tools they need, and if they don't, you order them. You make sure they know about the latest technology and processes, so you

culture

On Creating Culture

In the workplace, few things are more pervasive than a bad culture. A poor culture leads to clinical depression in employees, declined productivity, and poor results. It's rather unfortunate that most have experienced it. Often, they can't verbalize it, and they may not fully understand all of the facets of

Kubernetes

How to Deploy Anything to Kubernetes (Part 1 - Containerizing an Application)

Do we really mean anything? No. Because not everything is capable of being deployed with Kubernetes, and some things are not worth deploying on Kubernetes. Those things are beyond the scope of this writing, but in a future series, we will explore the options available for getting those applications onto

Kubernetes

ELI5: Kubernetes

Explain it like I'm five: Kubernetes. Here are the big highlights that define the use case of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes

Create a full-featured Kubernetes Cluster on your PC

With only a single command, you could have a fully-functional cluster running locally in seconds!

Blog Posts

IBM to Acquire BoxBoat

I am very excited to announce the next step in my own personal journey as I continue forward with BoxBoat, an IBM Company. This will expand my ability to provide the top-notch services in Containers, DevOps, and Security. I love helping companies advance their capabilities, and I look forward to

github

Sorting GitHub Repositories

GitHub has taken a strong stance on not implementing a folder structures to support sorting of repositories. Why is that? They believe that it is unnecessary – and it is. Adding folders would add a layer of confusion that can be solved easily at a more meta level. This holds true

terraform

Terraform and Helm

Did you know that you can fully create a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure using Terraform? Well you can take that one step further and also manage what's installed in your cluster using Terraform and Helm. This can be done by using the Helm provider for Terraform. Now, let's say

Kubernetes

Kubernetes - 413 Request Entity Too Large

How to solve 413 Request Entity Too Large in Kubernetes using NGINX Ingress.

Kubernetes

Restrict Traffic to a Pod in Kubernetes

Let's say you have a pod that you want to reject all traffic to, unless the traffic is coming from a specific type of pod. In this case, an ingress Network Policy will serve your needs. Here's a quick example of what that might look like below, then we will

Kubernetes

Verify Node is Ready to join K8s Cluster

What happens if a node joins a cluster before it is ready? Fortunately, you'll never have to find out. For this very reason, there is a test suite maintained by the Kubernetes community called the Node Conformance Test. This set of tests will ensure that the node complies with at

Kubernetes

Major Limitations of Kubernetes

The limits of Kubernetes are generally going to be difficult to hit for many organizations. But having said that, here are the major limitations of Kubernetes: * Maximum pods per node: 100 * Maximum nodes: 5,000 * Maximum pods: 150,000 * Maximum containers: 300,000

kubectl

Set Kubectl Namespace

Easily and rapidly switch between kubectl namespaces.

Career

How to Keep up with the Rapid Pace of Azure

I work with Azure a lot. And as a Solutions Architect, I often find myself seeking answers to rather deep questions, refreshing my memory on old tech or concepts, or seeking new technology or solutions to solve my problems. I admit, it's extremely hard to keep up. Whatever the case,

business

How to Communicate in the Modern Workplace

By now, we've all read the research, the horror stories, and the comics about how synchronous our workplaces require us to be. Insane numbers of emails, people changing the subject of an email thread instead of starting a new thread, endless slack messages. It's very easy to say what we

cloud

Azure Private Link

Have you ever created a resource in Azure (i.e. a database or storage account) and seen the option "Allow access to Azure services". You can toggle this on and allow any Azure service to talk with your resource, assuming it is authenticated. For most, that's an acceptable practice. But

Azure Kubernetes Service

The Best Way to Get Started with Kubernetes

I'm going to share with you some of the best resources out there for learning Kubernetes. Take a look!

Kubernetes

Set a Default Namespace for Kubectl (And Easily Jump Between Namespaces)

A few quick and easy ways to switch contexts rapidly.

Kubernetes

The Purpose of Labels and Selectors in Kubernetes

Logically isolate and group objects inside of Kubernetes with loose coupling.

manager

How to Make your Developers Work Faster

Find the courage to slow down so you can speed up. This counterintuitive approach is indubitably the most effective way to create a high-performing team or organization.

git

Choosing a Git Branching Strategy

There are several out there, and a lot of opinions to go with them. Having served in a consulting capacity for many organizations, ranging from small startups to very large enterprises, I have seen all of the major strategies. I've even seen organizations make up their own strategies in an

Azure Kubernetes Service

How Many Kubernetes Clusters You Should Have 🚢

At my current company, the powers that be have bought into a multi-cluster approach. I'm not saying 1 cluster per environment or region. No. I'm saying 1 non-production  and 1 production cluster per system per region. Essentially, each team gets their own pair of clusters in each region we choose

azure active directory

Visualize Azure Active Directory Role-Based Access Control for Kubernetes

Acronyms: * AAD - Azure Active Directory * AKS - Azure Kubernetes Service * RBAC - Role-based access control Recently, I implemented AAD for AKS RBAC. The documentation doesn't do a great job of visualizing what the mappings look like, so here's a quick view of how you can think of it. Let's

terraform

Why I Don't Deploy Infrastructure Manually Anymore

I admit it. There was a time, very recently, when I deployed infrastructure by going into the Azure portal and clicking some buttons. It seems so easy! But there's an associated cost. So much so that I just finished defined and deployed a new Azure Kubernetes Service cluster with Terraform.

DevSecOps

Pipelines as Code - Don't Reinvent the Wheel

The term "Pipelines as Code" means that you are defining the process through which your code moves from source control, all the way to running in production. This practice is absolutely necessary if you want to build a high performing development process that allows your system to be rapidly iterated