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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
In the last post we looked at how to automate the creation of GKE Kubernetes clusters in GCP, however the deployment of workloads to these clusters was still something of a manual process. Enter Helm; the a package manager for Kubernetes. If this is your first time hearing those words it can be pretty confusing, typically when we think of package management we think of application packages or application dependencies . . .
Google Cloud Platform tends to be forgotten from the conversation a lot when talking about public cloud offerings, however their hosted Kubernetes offering GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) has for me been the best of the major offerings for getting to grips with the platform and the best reason to use GCP at all. Without much issue we can get Terraform integrated with GCP, provision and scale out clusters as we . . .