Category: Technology

  • Tech Tips – Upgrading your Argo cluster tools

    Moving my home lab to GitOps and ArgoCD has been, well, nearly invisible now. With the build pipelines I have in place, I’m able to work on my home projects without much thought to deploying changes to my clusters. My OCD, however, prevents me from running old versions. I really want to stay up-to-date when…

  • I’ll take ‘Compatibility Matrices’ for $1000, Alex…

    I have posted a lot on Kubernetes over the past weeks. I have covered a lot around tools for observability, monitoring, networking, and general usefulness. But what I ran into over the past few weeks is both infuriating and completely avoidable, with the right knowledge and time to keep up to speed. The problem I…

  • Kubernetes Observability, Part 4 – Using Linkerd for Service Observability

    This post is part of a series on observability in Kubernetes clusters: Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki Part 2 – Collecting Metrics with Prometheus Part 3 – Dashboards with Grafana Part 4 – Using Linkerd for Service Observability (this post) Part 5 – Using Mimir for long-term metric storage As we start to…

  • Kubernetes Observability, Part 3 – Dashboards with Grafana

    This post is part of a series on observability in Kubernetes clusters: Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki Part 2 – Collecting Metrics with Prometheus Part 3 – Dashboards with Grafana (this post) Part 4 – Using Linkerd for Service Observability Part 5 – Using Mimir for long-term metric storage What good is Loki’s…

  • Kubernetes Observability, Part 2 – Collecting Metrics with Prometheus

    This post is part of a series on observability in Kubernetes clusters: Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki Part 2 – Collecting Metrics with Prometheus (this post)Part 3 – Building Grafana DashboardsPart 4 – Using Linkerd for Service ObservabilityPart 5 – Using Mimir for long-term metric storage “Prometheus” appears in many Kubernetes blogs the…

  • Kubernetes Observability, Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki

    This post is part of a series on observability in Kubernetes clusters: Part 1 – Collecting Logs with Loki (this post) Part 2 – Collecting Metrics with Prometheus Part 3 – Dashboards with Grafana Part 4 – Using Linkerd for Service Observability Part 5 – Using Mimir for long-term metric storage I have been spending…

  • An Impromptu Home Lab Disaster Recovery Session

    It has been a rough 90 days for my home lab. We have had a few unexpected power outages which took everything down. And, for the unexpected outages, things came back up. Over the weekend, I was doing some electrical work outside, wiring up outlets and lighting. Being safety conscious, I killed the power to…

  • Nginx Reverse proxy: A slash makes all the difference.

    I have been doing some work to build up some standard processes for Kubernetes. ArgoCD has become a big part of that, as it allows us to declaratively manage the state of our clusters. After recovering from a small blow-up in the home lab (post coming), I wanted to migrate my cluster tools to utilize…

  • The cascading upgrade continues…

    I mentioned in a previous post that I made the jump to Windows 11 on both my work and home laptops. As it turns out, this is causing me to re-evaluate some of my other systems and upgrade them as needed. Old (really old) Firmware The HP ProLiant Gen8 Server I have been running for…

  • Breaking an RKE cluster in one easy step

    With the release of Ubuntu’s latest LTS release (22.04, or “Jammy Jellyfish), I wanted to upgrade my Kubernetes nodes from 20.04 to 22.04. What I had hoped would be an easy endeavor turned out to be a weeks-long process with destroyed clusters and, ultimately, an ETCD issue. The Hypothesis As I viewed it, I had…