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1-Step Away From Fossil Fuel: Sanden Heat Pump
After weeks of waiting, thanks to lock downs in Victoria, I finally have a 315L Sanden Heat Pump installed, replacing my who-knows-how old gas instantaneous water heater. The job has been done professionally by SolarFlow, kudos to the team! I can label myself an environmentalist who keeps trying to minimize my own carbon footprint but…
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Use Variables with Kustomize, Part 2
I was looking at the Kustomize variable trick I did a year ago and I think I’ve learned some new tricks worth noting down. Variables are very handy most of the times, here’s a pattern to define a variable to be used in Kustomize templates and set its value via annotations. There you have it:…
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Automate SSL/TLS Certificates for Kubernetes and Istio with Cert Manager
It’s been a lot easier nowadays to turn on full site SSL/TLS encryption with an ACME issuer such as the popular non-profit Let’s Encrypt which I’ve started using it a few months ago. However the free certificates from Let’s Encrypt are only valid for 90 days and I have been notified to renew them already.…
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Grant a Service Account an IAM Role in AWS/GCP
How to grant a pod running in a Kubernetes cluster necessary permissions to access cloud resources such as S3 buckets? The most straight forward approach is to save some API key in the pod and use it to authenticate against cloud APIs. If the cluster is running inside the cloud, an IAM role can then…
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I Farmed Some Chia(XCH)
Chia is a relatively new crypto currency which can be ‘mined’ with hard disks. It’s advertised as a green crypto because hard disks consumes way less energy comparing to mining rigs with high end graphic cards. I installed Chia on my Ubuntu Linux desktop computer because it has some vacant SATA ports that I can…
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TLS Full Site Encryption with Istio and Let’s Encrypt
These are steps to easily install TLS certs to a Kubernetes cluster with Istio service mesh as ingress controller, provided by Let’s Encrypt‘s awesome certbot. Installation of the certbot (on Ubuntu Linux 20.04LTS) The certbot can be install via snap on Ubuntu Linux By default certbot needs to write to system directories which I thought…
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A Kubernetes ClusterSecret
No, at this moment ClusterSecret, unlike ClusterRole, doesn’t officially exist in any version of Kubernetes yet. I’ve seen some discussion like this, so looks like it will be a while to have a ClusterSecret. But why do I need a ClusterSecret in the first place? The reason is very simple: To be DRY. Imagine I…
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Real Life Cost of a Tesla Model 3
It’s been a bit more than 2 weeks since I got my Model 3 as a result of my impulse-buying, so as an end user I think I’m qualified to do some cost analysis and projection based on the first 1000km I’ve done with the car. Disclaimer: The following analysis is based on my calculation…