DevOps and Platform Engineering How to backup Microk8s clusters with Velero in 2026 If you’re looking for a reliable way to backup Microk8s clusters with Velero, you have found the solution to your problems. In this tutorial, I’ll guide you through the necessary steps to successfully backup everything, including volumes. But first a quick introduction on Microk8s and Velero. Just skip
DevOps and Platform Engineering Docker Basics Tutorial These exercises are designed to complement the Docker Basics lab you should have completed earlier, offering additional hands-on practice to reinforce your understanding of key Docker concepts. By working through these tasks, you’ll gain deeper insights into: * Running and managing containers with real-world examples like MySQL and Nginx. * Configuring
DevOps and Platform Engineering VMs vs Containers: Solving Deployment Challenges Welcome to the first lesson of the Kubernetes Essentials Course! 🚀 In this article, we’re diving into the challenges that physical servers and virtual machines (VMs) were designed to solve and why containers emerged as the next evolution in application deployment. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding
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
DevOps and Platform Engineering 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
DevOps and Platform Engineering 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 Immutable Kubernetes Pods Immutable Kubernetes Pods are absolutely necessary if you are deploying your applications in a containerized environments and you want them to be secure. Despite this, most developers and teams do not use immutable pods. In this tutorial, I will explain in a simple manner what they are and why they
DevOps and Platform Engineering Install and Learn Kubernetes in 10 minutes In this tutorial, I will show you how to install and learn the basics of Kubernetes in just 10 minutes. We will be using a super-lightweight certified distribution of Kubernetes: MicroK8s by Canonical. This distribution requires very little resources and can run on Linux, Windows and macOS. For the purpose
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
