kubernetes – Made by Mikal

Argo CD in practice

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 10, 2024
Post category:Book

I guess it's no surprise that work uses Argo CD, so it seemed like time to understand it a bit better. Unfortunately this book has what I have come to expect from Packt publishing -- it could do with a more solid editorial pass to be honest. The English in the book is awkward, and a simple grammar pass by an experienced editor would have made a big improvement to the whole book. Worse, its clear little technical review occurred either, there is at least one case where a Kubernetes YAML field is typo'ed in the text and simply wont work as published. As an aside, I went and looked at my technical bookshelf, and I have literally zero books from Packt that I've bothered to keep. I am very close to just stopping buying books published by them. This book starts with an introduction to Kubernetes, which is a bit repetitive if you already use it. Given Kubernetes is a prerequisite for using Argo CD, it certainly seems like that will be the case for many readers. Explaining Kubernetes makes sense in the context of explaining where Argo CD fits in, but I can't help but think there should…

The Kubernetes Book (2024 edition)

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 6, 2024
Post category:Book

This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn't a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can rustle up a good set of technical editors and reviewers yourself. That said, I think one of the risks with self published technical books like this is that they are overly credulous, and I think this book falls into that trap early by describing Kubernetes as the "cloud operating system". Like I get it, you're excited about Kubernetes, but making claims that all of the cloud runs on Kubernetes just undermines your work before you've even really started. I can't find any public data, either academic or anecdotal, which supports the assertion that Kubernetes is even the most popular way to run workloads in clouds. I'm sure that AWS has more VMs not running Kubernetes for example than they do have running it. That said, it is clear at this point that Kubernetes is the dominant player for container clustering. So why not just say…

Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: online training

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 27, 2019
Post category:Kubernetes

There are a few online training resources I've had a play with while learning Kubernetes, so I figure that's worth a quick write up. This is a follow on from my post about Kubernetes podcasts I've tried. I've tried three training providers so far: The Linux Foundation Kubernetes course (LFS258 Kubernetes Fundamentals) is probably the "go to" resource for many people, and is often sold bundled with the certification exams. Unfortunately, it is really terrible. It is by far the worst course I've seen so far. On the other hand, the Linux Academy Kubernetes course is really good. It is flaw is that you have to sign up to Linux Academy, which provides you with all you can eat courses for a rather steep annual fee. Finally, I discovered Mumshad Mannambeth's Udemy courses, and frankly they're excellent. He's put a huge amount of effort into them and it really shows. Even better, with Udemy's regular sales you can pick up his three Kubernetes courses (intro, admin certification, and developer certification) for under $50 AUD. There are even plenty of online quizzes. If I was going to pick a course to try, I'd definitely go with Mumshad.

Coming to grips with Kubernetes in 2020: podcasts

Post author:mikal
Post published:December 13, 2019
Post category:Kubernetes

It has become clear to me that it is time to care about Kubernetes more. I'm sure many people have cared for ages, but the things I want to build at the moment are starting to be more container based now that I am thinking more at the application layer than the cloud infrastructure layer. So how to do that? I thought I'd write down some notes on what has worked (or not) for me, in the hope it will help others. In this post, podcasts. I thought podcasts would be an interesting way to get started with some nice overviews. This is especially true because I'm already a pretty heavy podcast user, so it was easy to slot into my existing routine. Unfortunately this hasn't really worked out. I started with the podctl podcast, but they only ever talk about Red Hat stuff. It is very rare for a guest to not be a Red Hat employee for example. The presenters of this podcast seem to also really dislike OpenStack for reasons they never explain, which is annoying. Then I figured maybe the Google Kubernetes podcast would be better, but it often lacks the depth I am interested in. I…

Kubernetes Fundamentals: Setting up nginx ingress

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 4, 2018
Post category:Kubernetes

I’m doing the Linux Foundation Kubernetes Fundamentals course at the moment, and I was very disappointed in the chapter on Ingress Controllers. To be honest it feels like an after thought — there is no lab, and the provided examples don’t work if you re-type them into Kubernetes (you can’t cut and paste of course, just to add to the fun).

I found this super annoying, so I thought I’d write up my own notes on how to get nginx working as an Ingress Controller on Kubernetes.

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