howto

A collection of 27 posts

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

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!

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

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,

Kubernetes

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

A few quick and easy ways to switch contexts rapidly.

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

culture

A Guide to Building Tech Team Culture

In my career, I have worked across so many types of companies. (List not in order) * A large tech company * A large non-profit * A small non-profit * An early-stage tech startup * A small boot-strapped Azure and DevOps consultancy * A medium-sized venture-backed Microsoft-focused consultancy * A publicly traded consultancy that focuses on Government

Azure Kubernetes Service

GitOps with Terraform for Kubernetes

Did you know that Terraform can run kubectl commands? Yep! There's a provider for Kubernetes. The Kubernetes provider has a growing list of resources that you can manage via Terraform. For instance, you could declaratively and explicitly manage Kubernetes permissions via Terraform by defining roles and role bindings. Then when

Azure Kubernetes Service

How to Fix Terraform Helm and Kubernetes Providers after implementing AAD RBAC in AKS

I implemented the Azure Active Directory (AAD) integration with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for Role Based Access Control (RBAC) today in an existing cluster. I use Terraform to manage the cluster as well as all of the Helm installs and custom resource definitions that I apply via kubectl. The Problem

Kubernetes

Connect to an Application in Kubernetes as Localhost

This is an incredibly useful tool. If you have an application running in Kubernetes and you need to connect to you application or database, you can simply forward a port to your local machine via the kubectl port-forward command. Let's say you have a MySQL database running in Kubernetes and

Kubernetes

Migrating to Kubernetes: A Manager's Guide to Effective Transition (Part 1)

For teams that are looking to build out a Kubernetes cluster and migrate their applications, my first reaction is always the same, no matter the skill-level and capability of the team. Here's something of how the conversation goes: First, let's identify your Kubernetes administrators and let them begin building out

Kubernetes

When to use a StatefulSet in Kubernetes

To put it simply, a StatefulSet should be used to govern one or more related pods that need to track state in some way. A StatefulSet would be what you use instead of a Deployment. StatefulSets are a particularly cool implementation detail among Kubernetes workload APIs. It works very similarly

Career

How to Get Started with Kubernetes

When getting started with Kubernetes, I was extremely lost. I tried jumping straight into the Kubernetes documentation, but I wasn't able to make sense of it all and where to begin. It's okay if that's where you are – that's totally normal. So, then, what is an effective way to get

ci/cd

CI/CD for Kubernetes Applications (Part 1)

So you're ready to automate your application deployment to Kubernetes. You've made the right choice! Let's consider what a pipeline might look like if you are using Kubernetes manifests directly without the use of a tool such as Helm. In other words, you just have some YAML files sitting somewhere

GitOps

What is GitOps

Simply put: GitOps is a way of managing infrastructure, configuration, permissions, etc... in an explicit and repeatable way by simply pushing changes to git and allowing an associated pipeline to make the changes come to life. Let's dig a little deeper. What GitOps Isn't GitOps is not meant to replace

ghost

Ghost CMS in Kubernetes

Let's get right down to business: Can Ghost CMS run in Kubernetes? Yes! This site is proof. It's running on my personal cluster in Digital Ocean (previously Azure Kubernetes Service, but Digital Ocean costs about half the price). How to do it It's relatively simple. Once you get things running