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MySQL Online DDL Operations Made Simple with gh-ost
What’s an online DDL operation? In a nut shell, a DDL(Data Definition Language) operation is something like alter table … which will change the data structure of a table. Some changes only touch metadata, eg. index, etc. so those can be updated in-place. But if a field definition needs to change, eg. UTF8mb3 –> UTF8mb4,…
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How I Upgraded Sail Operator And How I Would Do It Next Time
It’s been a while since I installed Istio with Sail Operator in my home lab Kubernetes cluster. The version of Sail Operator was 0.2 and now 1.26 is available. There are so many releases between 0.2 and 1.26! Can I upgrade directly to the latest and skip all the middle ones? It’s my home lab…
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eGPU on Arch Linux – Not As Hard As I Expected
A few years ago, I bought a bulky nVidia RTX 3080 GPU as part of my venture into crypto mining, I also DIYed a thermal pad upgrade for it so it runs cooler and quieter. But since the PoS merge of Ethereum in 2022, it’s no longer mine-able using GPUs so my 3080 started to…
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Resource Optimisation Made Simple in Kubernetes Clusters
TL; DR: I made a shell script which prints out the CPU and memory usage vs allocation for each pod in a Kubernetes cluster. Then it’s easy to tell where to optimise. Here it is: Just in case, you need the metrics-server for the kubectl top command to function. 🙂
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How to Upgrade Kubeadm Kubernetes Clusters The Fast Way
My home lab Kubernetes cluster built with kubeadm hasn’t got an upgrade for a while, still at 1.29 which was first released roughly 2 years ago. And the latest is 1.33 already. According to the official kubeadm docs Skipping MINOR versions when upgrading is unsupported. Which basically says, if you try to upgrade from 1.29…
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Unit Testing in Jsonnet
For the time being(April 2025), there doesn’t seem to be a de facto Jsonnet framework for unit testing. Yet with simple assert statements it’s very helpful to have tests for shared functions, etc. 🙂
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Slow Refresh in ArgoCD? Scale It Up
TL; DR: I merged a few ArgoCD clusters together into a central ArgoCD last week, just to have 1 ArgoCD to manage multiple GKE clusters. Obviously this will cause some performance issue – the more apps I have, the longer it takes to refresh in ArgoCD. Here’s a simple way to scale it up. For…
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Never Buy a Tesla, Part 2
I wrote the Never Buy a Tesla 4 years ago, which essentially a click-bait. I didn’t have any trouble with my car so I recommend it to my friends and a few of them bought a Tesla too. Not like a legit Tesla fan with a collection of Tesla swags and souvenirs, but I consider…