Kubernetes

Setting up Longhorn on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster

Introduction My article on setting up a Ceph cluster with Rook on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster turned out to be my most popular post. That’s not surprising, considering the process involves several steps and often requires patience and digging through related GitHub issues for troubleshooting. While Rook can be a solid choice for administrators familiar with managing Ceph storage clusters, it does come with a steep learning curve and considerable complexity. As an operator, Rook wraps around Ceph, automating many of the intricate tasks that cluster admins previously handled manually. One drawback of using Ceph is its requirement for unformatted partitions or devices on each node, which makes it less suitable for setups with tighter resource constraints.

Sunday, April 20, 2025 Read

Notes on becoming a Kubestronaut

What is a Kubestronaut? The “Kubestronaut” title is a badge of honor that CNCF has been offering since March 2024 to Kubernetes professionals who have successfully passed all the Kubernetes certifications(CKA, CKAD, CKS, KCNA, KCSA). This term is meant to be used within the Kubernetes community to denote someone who has mastered the full spectrum of Kubernetes knowledge, from foundational concepts to application development to security. Apart from the catchy title itself, this programme brings 5 50% off discounts for other CNCF certifications, a “Kubestronaut” branded jacket, 20% off three CNCF events and a mention of you together with the other kubestronauts on the CNCF website.

Wednesday, December 25, 2024 Read

Setting up a Ceph cluster with Rook on a Raspberry Pi k3s cluster

Introduction Due to the low IOPS of the micro SD cards, I decided to switch to external NVMe SSDs. In addition to the boot partition, each SSD has a large unused partition that I am utilizing to provision Kubernetes Persistent Volumes through a Rook Ceph Cluster. I chose this approach as a learning opportunity to explore Kubernetes-native storage. Since my cluster isn’t running any critical applications, I don’t need data replication, so Local Persistent Volumes would have been sufficient. However, in production environments, the following requirements often arise:

Friday, November 22, 2024 Read

Setting up a homelab on a RaspberryPi cluster with k3s

Introduction Since beginning my career in DevOps, my focus has largely been on cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS), and I haven’t had the opportunity to engage deeply with traditional sysadmin tasks or server administration. I believe that setting up my own homelab and hosting applications will enhance my DevOps skills. This hands-on experience will allow me to explore storage, networking, and container orchestration at a more fundamental level, beyond the cloud abstractions I am used to. This article will highlight the hardware I chose for my homelab and the configuration needed to deploy k3s on a RaspberryPi cluster.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 Read

Deploying the 2048 game on EKS with ArgoCD

Introduction Recently, I delved deeply into EKS setup, aiming to establish a solid understanding of IAM management, focusing on the aws_auth config map and access policies. I also explored how to expose applications via the AWS Load Balancer ingress controller and ensured the correct tags were in place for automatic discovery of private and public subnets. Additionally, I wanted to install ArgoCD, expose its UI through an ingress, and deploy an application using ArgoCD. Since the game 2048 is widely used in Kubernetes deployment demos, I chose to include it in this demonstration.

Saturday, September 28, 2024 Read

Writing a Go CLI for deploying Kubernetes

Introduction A few months ago, I wrote a set of shell scripts to bootstrap Kubernetes on Multipass VMs. While they worked well, I found it challenging to present them in a user-friendly way. I wanted a clean solution to package these scripts into a single binary, complete with self-contained documentation, that people could easily install and use without cloning a repository. After some research, I discovered Cobra, a popular Go framework for creating CLIs. Seeing that well-known applications like Kubernetes, Hugo, and GitHub CLI use Cobra, I decided to give it a try.

Monday, July 22, 2024 Read

Kubernetes operators 101: what they are, what benefits they bring and how to deploy them

What is a Kubernetes operator? Simply put, an operator is an automated Site Reliability Engineer for an application. It is a way to package, run and maintain an application in a cloud native way. Operators reduce the management overhead for cluster administrators and make it easier for developers to use essential software components like databases and storage systems. Operators are mainly targeted at managing stateful applications which have non-trivial requirements with regards to storage, networking and fault-tolerance.

Sunday, June 30, 2024 Read