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Kubernetes 1.24: Bye Bye Docker
Since I just got extra 4 CPU cores and 32GB of memory to my garage Kubernetes lab cluster, there’s enough capacity to let me juggle some upgrades. My cluster was running Kubernetes version 1.22 for almost a year which is already reaching end-of-life in many commercial managed Kubernetes offerings. After some reading I found that…
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Ubuntu Server 20.04 on ThinkPad W520
10 years ago, I would dream for a ThinkPad W520 laptop: imagine 4 cores, 8 threads, 32GB memory and 160GB SSD in 2012! I saw one of these old battleship-class laptops Gumtree the other day so I bought it without much hesitation – It’s still very good as a mini server even in 2022. In…
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How to Use YAML as Data Source in Terraform
I love how DRY and lean YAML can be, since I started to learn Ansible years ago. Recently I wanted to provision MySQL user privileges right after the database instance provisioned in Google Cloud SQL. I used petoju/mysql Terraform provider to get the job done, it’s a community provider but seemed to be quite popular.…
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Monitoring as Code with Grafana
TL;DR: I used Grafana Helm charts and ArgoCD to deploy dashboards as code. I’ve been using Grafana to build dashboards for years, both at work and as a hobby. A dashboard was created by hand for monitoring my garage Kubernetes cluster. Since I’ve adopted gitOps with ArgoCD a few years ago, what about going forward…
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How to Connect to Cloud SQL via SSH
TL;DR: here’s a handy bash script which can connect to a private Cloud SQL instance(MySQL in this case) via a bastion host. Prerequisites: Google Cloud SQL instance with mTLS certs provisioned Google Cloud SDK installed(the gcloud command) a bash shell(better be V5.0+) OpenSSH and MySQL CLI installed Google Cloud SQL is an RDB as a…
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A Load Balancer for Cloud SQL Replicas
TL;DR: As of Aug 2022, there’s no out of box load balancing for Google Cloud SQL read replicas. So I built one for MySQL replicas with HAProxy with the ability to dynamically reload when number of replicas has changed. It will be quite straight forward to run a few HAProxy pods in Kubernetes as a…
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How to Use a Local Persistent Volume
TL;DR: A local persistent volume in a Kubernetes cluster is a persistent volume allocated in a certain node. Any pod mounting the volume will be automatically scheduled in the same node. Since it’s limited to 1 node, clearly it can’t be used as a high-availability solution, but hey, it’s quite Ok to use it for…
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Home Owner’s Guide to Free Gas Heating
TL; DR. No there’s no free natural gas but there’s free electricity, hope you don’t mind heating up your rooms with reverse cycle air conditioners instead My old house had an equally old gas heater, and we had been using it for years. 4 years ago, the heater broke down, so I had it replaced…