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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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In: AWS, Kubernetes
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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 →

031921 1226 Gettingread12

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In: AWS, Kubernetes
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Over the last few weeks since completing the 10 part series covering my home lab Kubernetes playground I have started to look more into the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that you can use to run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install, operate, and maintain your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes. I will say here that the continuation of “this is not that hard” is still the case and if anything and as probably expected when you start looking into managed services. Don’t get me wrong I am sure if you are running multiple clusters and hundreds ofRead More →

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This post will wrap up the 10-part series of getting started on my hands-on learning journey of Kubernetes, the idea here was to try and touch on a lot of the areas without going through the theory in these posts. A lot of theory I have picked up through various learning assets that I have listed here. In the previous posts we have gone into creating a platform for our Kubernetes cluster to run on, we have touched on various stateless and stateful applications, load balancers and object storage amongst a few more topics to get going and started. We have only touched the surfaceRead More →

kubernetes learning

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The last post was to focus a little more on applications but not so much between the stateful and stateless types of applications but in the shape of application deployment. This was deploying KubeApps and using this as an application dashboard for Kubernetes. This post is going to focus on a deployment that is firstly “mission critical” and that contains a front end and a back end. Recently Dean and I covered this in a demo session we did at the London VMUG. I would also like to add here that the example nodejs application and mongodb back end was first created here. Dean alsoRead More →

kubernetes learning

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The last post covered how to implement a load balancer such as MetalLB if you are running your learning environment outside the public cloud, the public cloud generally brings this capability natively. This post is going to focus a little more on applications but not so much between the stateful and stateless types of applications but in the shape of application deployment. We also covered in a previous post about Helm and Helm Charts and how they can help when you want to build out an application or deployment. This post will focus on KubeApps. Your Application Dashboard for Kubernetes. Getting KubeApps installed It isRead More →

kubernetes learning

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In the last post, we talked about the Kubernetes context and how you can flip between different Kubernetes cluster control contexts from your Windows machine. We have also spoken about in this series how load balancing gives us better access to our application vs using the node port for access. This post will highlight how simple it is to deploy your load balancer and configure it for your home lab Kubernetes cluster. Roll your own Kubernetes Load Balancer If you deployed your Kubernetes cluster in Cloud, the cloud provider will take care of creating Load balancer instances. But if you are using bare metal forRead More →

kubernetes learning

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In the last post, we covered an overview of Helm and the MinIO deployment to give us an option for testing later on workloads that require object storage. In this post, we are going to focus on context and how to make sure you have access from your desktop to your Kubernetes Cluster. Context Image is taken from Kubernetes.io Context is important, the ability to access your Kubernetes cluster from your desktop or laptop is required. Lots of different options out there and people use obviously different operating systems as their daily drivers. In the post we are going to be talking about Windows butRead More →

kubernetes learning

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In the last post, we covered setting up dynamic shared storage with my NETGEAR ReadyNAS system for our Kubernetes storage configuration. This is what I have in my home lab but any NFS server would bring the same outcome for you in your configuration. This post will cover two areas we will continue to speak to Kubernetes storage options but we will cover object storage, I am going to use MinIO to be able to have an object storage option in my lab, I can use this to practice some tasks and demo things between Veeam Backup & Replication and Kasten and storing backup files.Read More →

kubernetes learning

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In the last three parts we covered, starting from scratch and getting the Kubernetes platform ready, this was using some old hardware and creating some virtual machines to act as my nodes. But if you don’t have old hardware but you still wish to build out your cluster then these virtual machines can really sit wherever they need to, for example, they could be in the public cloud but remember this is going to cost you. My intention was to remove all costs as possible as this system I am using is always running in my home network as it acts as my backup serverRead More →