DevOps and Platform Engineering

How a Kubernetes Service with No Selector Simplified My Workflow

Did you know Kubernetes can manage TLS certificates for applications running outside the cluster? If this is news to you, you're in for an insightful tutorial! This guide explains how I use Kubernetes to route traffic and manage certificates for external applications, solving key challenges along the way.

DevOps and Platform Engineering

How to secure a Kubernetes Nginx Ingress with Basic Auth

There are scenarios where we want to expose services outside our Kubernetes cluster that do not have proper authentication and authorization baked in. In these particular cases, it is possible to enable Basic Auth at the Ingress with few simple steps. Note that this tutorial is specific to the Nginx

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Kubernetes Architecture Explained

How does Kubernetes work? And what makes it so successful? Despite its popularity, few software engineers have a good understanding of the inner mechanisms of Kubernetes such as declarative APIs and control loops. In this post, I’ll break down the Kubernetes architecture and highlight key aspects that have made

Kubernetes

How to integrate cert-manager with Let's Encrypt and Cloudflare

If you're looking to automatically issue and renew certificates using cert-manager and Let's Encrypt for a domain record managed and proxied by Cloudflare using Full (strict) TLS, you're in the right place. The process is straightforward, and you'll have everything set up

Newsletter

EP4: Time to ditch Google Analytics

This year, while giving a facelift to this website, I ditched Google Analytics for Plausible. It was the result of an important decision I made in the process: I wanted to give free content to my audience without cluttering the articles with ads or other intrusive software that could have

DevOps and Platform Engineering

How to fix MicroK8s restart loop

If you have enabled the cis-hardening plugin in your microk8s cluster, you might experience instability issues, especially after a node restart. In this article, I will explain the cause of this issue and how to fix microk8s in this scenario. Symptoms Sometimes it is not obvious that we have an

DevOps and Platform Engineering

GitOps Explained: Is it worth it?

If you’re thinking of adopting GitOps or want to know more about it, this is the right article for you. I’ll explain it and show its benefits, but most importantly I’ll cover the drawbacks which are not mentioned by other videos or blogs. I’ll stick to

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Reduce the size of Docker images with few steps

One of the advantages of using Docker images is that they are portable. However, portability is directly related to the size. A mobile phone wouldn’t be really “mobile” if it weighed 10 Kg. The same applies to Docker images. We want our containers to be as slim as possible.

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Install Maven on Ubuntu 22.04

In this tutorial, we install the latest version of Maven on Ubuntu 22.04. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repository ships an old version of Maven which is not compatible with the recent versions of the Java Development Kit (JDK). We will proceed with the manual installation. Pre-requisites Before proceeding with the

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Install Java Temurin JDKs instead of OpenJDK on Ubuntu and Debian

As you may know, OpenJDK no longer provides official pre-built binaries or Docker images. Users who rely on readily available builds must migrate to other distributions to ensure they continue receiving feature updates and security patches. Eclipse Temurin, maintained by Adoptium, offers a reliable alternative with pre-built Java binaries and

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Kubernetes CKAD CKA CKS Certification Exam Tips

Kubernetes is hands down the most disruptive technology that we have seen in the IT industry in recent years. It is loved by software developers, operators, and business owners. It is pure expression of what DevOps means from a technical perspective. Holding a Kubernetes certification is something I strongly advice

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Configure microk8s NGINX Ingress

This is a very simple and short tutorial which helps you configure your NGINX Ingress on microk8s. A common use case is enabling the use-forwarded-headers flag so that NGINX passes incoming X-Forwarded-* headers to upstreams. Verify Addon Presence Let’s verify that the our ingress addon is enabled and running

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Easy centralized logging on Kubernetes with Grafana Loki

Centralized Log Management is an essential solution for modern software development, especially when utilizing cloud native technologies. In Kubernetes, your application runs in pods which are relatively ephemeral i.e., disposable entities. Trailing the logs of pods is simply a nightmare and in general a very bad idea. A better

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Expose TCP and UDP services with the Kubernetes Nginx Ingress Controller

This tutorial will show how to expose TCP or UDP services running in your Kubernetes cluster such as MySQL or any other database with the Nginx Ingress Controller. As you may know, the Kubernetes Ingress caters exclusively for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. If you want to expose other kind of

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Kubernetes Free TLS Certificate Management

How to Create and Manage TLS Certificates for Free on a Kubernetes cluster with Nginx and cert-manager. Using HTTPS to publish your website or expose your API is a must nowadays. Luckily, long gone are the days where you needed to spend hundreds of dollars and time to create and

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Install Nginx Ingress Controller on Kubernetes and MicroK8s

Nginx is the most popular Ingress Controller with Kubernetes. We find it in many Kubernetes distributions enabled by default. In this post, I will show you install and configure the Nginx Ingress Controller in few steps. Existent Installation Check Before going ahead and installing the Nginx Ingress Controller, we verify

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Easiest Kubernetes Install ever! Certified Kubernetes with just one command line

Kubernetes has a fairly complex architecture. For years, developers and operators shied away from trying it out because of its complex installation. Its popularity pushed the community to find ways to simplify this process and tools like kubeadm were created. However, even kubeadm is not straightforward for most. Today I

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Install Wordpress on Kubernetes

WordPress is without doubt the leading content management tool on the internet. It’s simple to use and it has an endless set of features and plugins. However, its setup and upgrade are not always straightforward. Today, I will teach you how to run it in just few minutes on

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Enable X-Forwarded-* Headers in Kubernetes Nginx Ingress Controller

If you experienced some issues with your application not redirecting to HTTPs or the correct host on Kubernetes, you are not alone. While refreshing some clusters, I started experiencing this issue as well. I immediately checked the configuration of my Load Balancer but it looked perfectly fine. After digging through

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Oops... I nuked my cluster!

Unfortunately, it has been a very hectic week in a very busy year! I did the wrong decision to refresh my Kubernetes cluster during the weekend. Some unexpected issues coupled with me being extremely tired and I managed to nuke my entire cluster of machines included the backups. No idea

CentOS Tutorials

Setup an Nginx Maintenance Page

Nginx grows in popularity day by day. Its solid performance and ease of setup make it a perfect tool to proxy traffic to your backend. In this article I will describe how you can configure a maintenance page that will be shown automatically every time you re-deploy or possibly your

CentOS Tutorials

Create a Kubernetes cluster on CentOS 7

Kubernetes is an open source system developed by Google which automates deployment, operations and scaling of containerized applications. It is a holistic solution for automated delivery offering a wide range of critical features like automatic binpacking, self-healing, auto-scaling, service registry, software load-balancing, automated rollouts, automated rollbacks, secret and configuration management,