Git - The Important Parts
This blog post is the first part of a three-part series adapted from a GitOps webinar series which we co-produced together with our friends at VSHN. In this first part, we will look at Git and what is important when using it in a team. The second part will be about Infrastructure as Code, a handy concept which helps to unify environments and be aware of the exact changes made to different parts of your infrastructure.
Kubernetes Cost Transparency
The cloud promises transparency into the cost of our applications and technical services. However, Kubernetes, even when managed by one of the big cloud service providers, usually gets charged as a black box, and is often used by dozens or hundreds of applications in your organization. This post outlines the necessary steps to approach cost transparency for your Kubernetes clusters from an organizational perspective, proposes a high level technical design to start with, and addresses some of the more common challenges and pitfalls.
Installing Arch Linux on UEFI with Full Disk Encryption
This is a step-by-step guide to installing Arch Linux on UEFI with full disk encryption. It deliberately contains no unnecessary words or bling. It is heavily based on the Arch Linux wiki’s installation guide, so if you’re ever stuck, just refer to it and the rest of the wonderful Arch wiki. Download ISO Download the latest ISO from the Arch Linux website Create Bootable USB Stick You can skip this step if you just want to run Arch Linux in a VM.
Creating Grafana Dashboards for Node.js Apps on Kubernetes
Many Kubernetes deployments include Prometheus and Grafana, so application teams can monitor their applications. While using Grafana may be relatively straightforward for many, the Prometheus data model and its query language PromQL is unknown and unintuitive to many developers. This blog post explains how to create a dashboard with a popular set of metrics for your Node.js applications on Kubernetes. Prerequisites We assume you have access to a Kubernetes cluster with the following components installed:
Efficient Navigation in Vim
When editing a file, it is quite crucial that you can navigate your cursor around rather quickly. Vim and Neovim allow for many ways of doing so which, depending on the situation, can be more or less efficient and useful. This article examines the different ways of moving the cursor and compares them. Here, the term “efficiency” refers to navigating the cursor with as little time and effort (i.e., the number of keystrokes) as possible.
Run a Crypto Trading Bot on Cloud Foundry
Everybody is talking about Bitcoin and its peer currencies. The hype is so great that even small investors, who have no idea about financial constructs, like myself, want to get aboard the investing and trading train. That’s why I recently decided to create my own account on GDAX and try my luck. Trading, at first, was fun, but I realized pretty quickly that I’m not the kind of person who wants to watch their dashboard every five minutes.
Run WordPress on Cloud Foundry
WordPress runs a huge portion of all websites on the internet. It, therefore, seems obvious, to run this software on Cloud Foundry. There’s just one small problem: WordPress uses the file system to store all uploaded media. On Cloud Foundry and other container-based systems, that doesn’t work because the container can be restarted at any time, which would remove all stored files. For that reason, we need to externalize all file storage to a separate service.
Run Docker Registry on Cloud Foundry
If you work a lot with Docker, you are probably used to the concept of having a Docker Registry, which allows you to store your images in a safe place. There’s a public registry that you can use for free at Docker Store. But what if you don’t want your images to be publicly available? What if you want to have your images in a safe place that you control? The solution is to deploy a private Docker registry.
Run Ghost on Cloud Foundry
This blog runs on Ghost. It’s a pretty light weight blogging platform based on Node.js. Let’s look into how it can be run on Cloud Foundry. Create Services To run Ghost, we’ll need two services: a database and an email server. First, let’s create the database. I’m using the Swisscom Application Cloud here, but you can use any Cloud Foundry provider. We’ll create a small MariaDB service which works like MySQL and therefore can be used by Ghost.
Docker for Local Development
I’m using Docker. Daily. It has become a very valuable part of my tool chain because it allows me to quickly set up any backend my applications might need to run and tear it down the second I don’t need it anymore. Gone are the days when you had to have all kinds of databases and other services installed just to be able to run your apps locally. With Docker, you can do all of that and isolate it from your machine.