Matt Gerega

Tag: techtip

  • Tech Tip – Formatting External Secrets in Helm

    This has tripped me up a lot, so I figure it is worth a quick note. The Problem I use Helm charts to define the state of my cluster in a Git repository, and ArgoCD to deploy those charts. This allows a lot of flexibility in my deployments and configuration. For secrets management, I use…

  • Don’t Mock Me!

    I spent almost two hours on a unit test issue yesterday, walking away with the issue unresolved and myself frustrated. I came back to it this morning and fixed it in 2 minutes. Remember, you don’t always need a mock library to create fakes. The Task at Hand In the process of removing some obsolete…

  • Tech Tip – Interacting with ETCD in Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2

    Since cycling my cluster nodes is a “fire script and wait” operation, I kicked one off today. I ended up running into an issue that required me to dig a bit into ETCD in RKE2, and could not find direct help, so this is as much my own reference as it is a guide for…

  • Tech Tip – Options Pattern in ASP.NET Core

    I have looked this up at least twice this year. Maybe if I write about it, it will stick with me. If it doesn’t, well, at least I can look here. Options Pattern The Options pattern is a set of interfaces that allow you to read options into classes in your ASP.NET application. This allows…

  • Tech Tip – You should probably lock that up…

    I have been running in to some odd issues with ArgoCD not updating some of my charts, despite the Git repository having an updated chart version. As it turns out, my configuration and lack of Chart.lock files seems to have been contributing to this inconsistency. My GitOps Setup I have a few repositories that I…

  • Tech Tip – Not all certificates are the same

    I have been trying to build a model in Azure to start modernizing one of our applications. Part of that is configuring an application gateway correctly and getting end-to-end SSL configured. As it turns out, not all certificates are good certificates, at least to Azure. Uploading the Cert I have a wildcard certificate for a…

  • Tech Tip – Configuring RKE2 Nginx Ingress using a HelmChartConfig Resource

    The RKE2 documentation is there, but, well, it is not quite as detailed as I have seen in other areas. This is a quick tip for customizing your Nginx Ingress controllers when using RKE2 Using Nginx Ingress in RKE2 By default, an RKE2 cluster deploys the nginx-ingress Helm chart. That’s great, except that you may…

  • Tech Tips – Moving away from k8s-at-home

    Much of what I learned about Helm charting and running workloads in Kubernetes I credit to the contributors over at k8s-at-home. There expansive chart collection helped me start to jump in to Kubernetes. Last year, they announced they were deprecating their repositories. I am not surprised: the sheer volume of charts they had meant they…

  • Bruce Lee to the Rescue! Health Checks for .NET Worker Services

    As we start to develop more containers that are being run in Kubernetes, we encounter non-http workloads. I came across a workload that represents a non-http processor for queued events. In .NET, I used the IHostedService offerings to run a simple service in a container to do this work. However, when it came time to…

  • 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…