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How to Build Multi-Arch Docker Images for MacBook M1
At work, I currently use a MacBook Pro with an Intel chipset and some of my colleagues have upgraded to ones with M1 chipset which is of arm64 or aarch64 architecture. Then expectedly I need to build some Docker images for both architectures. I’ve done some multi-arch Docker stuff before so this is not really…
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How To Renew Certificates in Kubernetes Clusters, Revisited
There is a lot of TLS certificates used by the core of a Kubernetes cluster and a popular one is the client-server pair used by kubectl to authenticate to the cluster control plane. In my previous notes on how to renew certificates in a Kubernetes cluster with kubeadm, I found that the steps are quite…
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Home Battery, Worth Buying?
During the lockdown days in 2020, I got A Tesla Powerwall 2 + Backup Gateway 2 combo installed by Natural Solar. The total cost was A$14,000. “Is it worth buying?” or “Would it pay for itself?” those were the question I got asked a lot. With a full year’s data from 2021, I think I…
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Blog Deployed With Jsonnet, Grafana Tanka and ArgoCD
It’s been a year since I did the ‘Hello World’ with Jsonnet and Tanka, then I made a simple side-loader container to install Tanka as a plugin to ArgoCD and finally deployed an httpbin container with ArgoCD + Tanka + Jsonnet. However since Jsonnet wasn’t used in my work, those things were shelved afterwards. Recently…
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Easy Kubernetes Secret Integration with ExternalSecrets

In a Kubernetes cluster, A Kubernetes Secret is a resource type to hold sensitive data for the apps to use, such as an API key or database password. Secrets are namespaced so if I have RBAC access to a namespace, I can pretty much see all the secrets there, as the secrets are only base64…
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Installation of Fedora 36 on Dell XPS 13 9380

I happened to have acquired a used Dell XPS 13 9380, which is a nice little ultrabook with Intel 8th gen i7 CPU, 16GB memory(not upgrade-able), 512GB nvme SSD and a beautiful 13″ 4k screen. It has Windows 10 installed. Of course I have no intention to continue to use the stock Windows 10. At…
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Better Resilience for Kubernetes Pods
I happened to notice that all 3 pods serving this blog in my Kubernetes cluster were allocated to a same node. I thought Kubernetes will try its best to shuffle pods of a deployment into different nodes by default but guess I expected too much. Note the knode3 below Have you spotted the problem? In…
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How to Regulate Egress Access in Kubernetes with Istio
Usually I don’t mind to give pods unlimited egress access, ie. the pods I deployed can access the whole internet if it needs to. However when the pods take input from users it’s a whole different story. For example, running some sandbox applications such as an online Python learning environment, the workload can be abused…

