Ansible is a big favourite of mine as anyone that knows me will tell you and has become one of the biggest players in the DevOps world, inevitably if you’re going to use it at any real scale you’ll need to start thinking about tags. Tags are an essential part of life in the cloud, given the scale and complexity we can encounter they really become the only way to . . .
EDIT: A few days after publishing this article, Hashicorp’s official AWS provider was updated to support default tags directly from the provider (which is very simple and saves all of the work detailed in this article). This only works with AWS so if you’re working in another cloud keep reading on, if you’re only working in AWS take a look at the Hashicorp blog post here which provides some very . . .
In the previous post we looked at how to build Chartmuseum on Ubuntu Linux with an S3 backend, however out of the box this system presents a number of problems; specifically it isn’t TLS encrypted and the service runs on an unprivileged TCP port. I could see no guides suggesting how to do this, so lets take a look at how to solve this problem by performing by proxying our . . .
Helm is an incredibly popular package manager for Kubernetes, however despite it’s incredibly widespread use there isn’t a huge amount of information or options out there for creating private repositories using Open Source platforms. Chartmuseum seeks to solve this problem by offering us just that. In this post I’m looking at how to deploy and bootstrap Chartmuseum on Ubuntu Linux 18.04, using a secure AWS S3 backend. Getting Started Chartmuseum . . .
When I first started using Ansible, querying JSON was a source of constant frustration. Most of the articles I could find on the topic seem particularly interested in a long lesson on the topic of how JSON is structured. Whilst that is important to understand I couldn’t really find a guide that just broke down a few simple queries like I wanted. I’m not even going to attempt to talk . . .
Recently I’ve been working with Ansible in GCP to try and automate the process of provisioning a bare metal Kubernetes cluster. A good find in this process was the Ansible gcp_compute plugin which allows for the construction of Dynamic Inventories based on your existing GCE resources. What Are We Working With? As is often the case with Ansible, the documentation is great but can be confusing without context or to . . .
Recently I’ve been looking AWS’ Elastic File Service platform, which allows for the provisioning of highly available PaaS storage which can accessed via NFS by multiple services at at very low cost. Whilst this is good, what’s even better is templating and automating the provisioning. In this post we’ll look at how to provision HA EFS storage using Terraform. What Do We Want? We have the option to create EFS . . .
In the days of cloud we’re often called on to integrate a lot of technologies together (as the somewhat messy title of this post suggests). One of the more recent systems I’ve encountered is Istio, popular Kubernetes Service Mesh, which in EKS tends to rely on an Elastic Load Balancer of one flavour or another as the point of access to it’s Gateway. In this post we’ll look at how . . .
Terraform is a powerful Infrastructure as Code tool ideal for creating cloud environments and its flexible HCL syntax allows for the provisioning of complex environments from simple templates, saving countless hours. Often missed is the ability to template resources and use them in conjunction with Terraform’s workspaces feature to maintain concurrent versions of the same environment. When coupled with even a basic Continuous Deployment pipeline this combination of systems allows . . .
If, like me, you’ve come from a traditional sysadmin background then Kubernetes can be daunting to say the least, this doesn’t get much easier when it comes to trying to get to grips with how to debug networking issues. Kubernetes networking is VAST and supports a number of complex implementations that vary between the major Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms (GKE, EKS, AKS) as well as many other options. The broad strokes are . . .