Using the Ansible uri module to test web services during playbook execution
Ansible has amazing support for testing services during playbook execution. This is super useful for validating your services are working after a set of changes take place, and when combined with...
View ArticleUsing Kubernetes affinity rules to control where your pods are scheduled
Kubernetes has truly revolutioned distributed computing. While it solves a number of super hard problems, it also adds a number of new challenges. One of these challenges is ensuring your Kubernetes...
View ArticleUpgrading an RPM to a specific version with yum
This past week I got to spend some time upgrading my CI/CD systems. The Gitlab upgrade process requires stepping to a specific version when you upgrade major versions, which can be a problem if the...
View ArticleUsing the Kubernetes K14S kapp utility to view deployment manifest changes...
If you’ve worked with Kubernetes for any length of time, you are probably intimately familiar with deployment manifests. If this concept is new to you, deployment manifests are used to add resources to...
View ArticleWays to debug Kubernetes pods without shells
Debugging production issues can sometimes be a challenge in Kubernetes environments. One specific challenge is debugging containers that don’t contain a shell. You may have seen the following when...
View ArticleUsing the Kubernetes can-i subcommand to debug authentication issues
When I was first getting started with Kubernetes, RBAC was one of the topics that took me the longest to grok. Not because the resources (Roles, ClusterRoles, etc) are hard to interpret, but learning...
View ArticleUsing tfswitch to manage Terraform versions
The growth of the Terraform community is absolutely astounding. New providers are constantly popping up, providers are being upgraded at a feverish pace, and amazing new features are constantly being...
View ArticleUnderstanding cloud spend in your Terraform workflows
Having worked in the “cloud” for several years, one thing that I’m super conscious about is our cloud bill. There are tons of subtleties associated with billing, such as AZ-to-AZ traffic costs or how...
View ArticleUsing terrascan to detect compliance and security violations
Over the past several years I’ve read numerous horror stories about cloud deployments gone wrong. S3 buckets with PCI data left open to the raw Internet, EC2 instance profiles that weren’t scoped...
View Article