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Something I started at the beginning of 2021 was setting aside an hour a day during the workday for learning. This tweet and a few others over the last few months then prompted me to write this post, to share my reasoning and why this is a good idea. “Where do you make time to learn new things?” There seems to be a common misconception that for you to learn new things it must be out of work hours! Let’s address this straight away, if you are learning a topic that will benefit your day to day job then any boss (a good boss orRead More →

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Last week at the Kasten booth at KubeCon 2021 EU I gave a 30-minute session on “Incorporating data management into your continuous deployment workflows and GitOps model” the TLDR was that with Kasten K10 we can use BackupActions and hooks from your favourite CD tool to make sure that with any configuration change you are also going to take a backup of your configuration before the change but most importantly the data will also be grabbed. This will become more apparent and more useful when you are leveraging ConfgMaps to interact with data that is being consumed and added by an external group of peopleRead More →

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Ransomware is a threat we hear about daily it seems and it is hitting every sector, I have actually been saying that everyone should be concerned here, it is just a matter of time before you are attacked and have to face the Ransomware story. This post is all about highlighting how to prevent your cloud workloads from being easily exposed as well as talking briefly about the remediation and how to get back up on your feet. In a previous post, I posted about Pac-Man as a mission-critical application, I have decided that this is a great way to show off the stateful approachRead More →

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Not my usual content but over the weekend I took the plunge again and successfully this time in getting Ubuntu dual booting with my Razer Blade Stealth 13″ 4K that I picked up mid pandemic last year (why oh why did I do that during a pandemic and no travel) This post will cover the steps I took to make sure that this would work on the laptop, I expect for many other laptops this process would also work especially if you had Windows pre-installed on the device. You might also want to check the warranty if you are going to do this, I didRead More →

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In a previous post, we hopefully covered the why and where the CSI has come from and where it is going and the benefits that come with having an industry-standard interface by enabling storage vendors to develop a plugin once and have it work across a number of container orchestration systems. The reason for this post is to highlight how to install the driver and enable volume snapshots, the driver itself is still in the beta phase, and the volume snapshot is in the alpha phase, alpha phase software is not supported within Amazon EKS clusters. The driver is well tested and supported in AmazonRead More →

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Some may say that Kubernetes is built for only stateless workloads but one thing we have seen over the last 18-24 months is an increase in those stateful workloads, think your databases, messaging queues and batch processing functions all requiring some state to be consistent and work. Some people will also believe that these states should land outside the cluster but can be consumed by the stateless workloads ran within the Kubernetes cluster. The people have spoken In this post, we are going to briefly talk about the storage options available in Kubernetes and then spend some time on the Container Storage Initiative / InterfaceRead More →

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My big project over the last month has not only been getting up to speed around Kubernetes but has had a parallel effort around Kubernetes storage and an open-source project that has been developed and today is released. In this post we are going to touch on how to get going with Kubestr, the first thing to mention is that this is a handy set of tools to help you identify, validate, and evaluate your Kubernetes storage. The Challenge The challenge we have with Kubernetes storage is that it’s not all that easy and it’s very manual to achieve some of the tasks that KubestrRead More →

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Over the last week or so I have been diving into the three main public clouds, I covered Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service, Google Kubernetes Engine and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. We are heading back to Amazon EKS for this post and we are focusing on a lightweight Linux container focused open-source operating system that will be our EKS node operating system in our cluster. What is Bottlerocket? “Bottlerocket is a Linux-based open-source operating system that is purpose-built by Amazon Web Services for running containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts.” Bottlerocket was released around a year ago in March 2020, an operating system designedRead More →

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In this post we will cover getting started with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) much the same as the previous posts covering Amazon EKS and Microsoft AKS, we will walk through getting a Kubernetes cluster up and running. Now we could walk through the Google Cloud Portal which is pretty straight forward and if you would like to see that as a walkthrough let me know and I will cover this but I think the most appropriate way is gearing up for Infrastructure as Code. As with all the public cloud managed Kubernetes posts I have covered they all have great documentation and walkthroughs on gettingRead More →

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This post is going to cover off using Azure PowerShell to get a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster up and running in your Azure Subscription. In the previous post, we went through the same AKS cluster creation using the Azure CLI Which one you choose will depend on your background and usage, if you are familiar with PowerShell then you might choose this option as you might be more familiar with the object output. There are lots of posts already out there around the Azure CLI vs Azure PowerShell here is one, but I am not going to get into that here. Install AzureRead More →