Recently, a friend of mine asked me what resources I'd recommend to start learning about Kubernetes. He was a victim of the layoffs that seem to be so prevalent right now and has experience as a classic SysOps / SysAdmin engineer but no expose to Kubernetes yet and wanted to learn to help improve his job-hunting prospects.
I wasn't sure what to recommend at first, it's been a long time since I was learning Kubernetes for the first time and wasn't sure what was still useful and relevant but what follows is what I ended up sharing with him, and now with all of you.
Last weekend I finally went to my first ever EMF Camp after wanting to go for 4+ years now. I had a thoroughly good time while I was there and wanted to share my experience to encourage others to go in the future.
I'm quite a fan of Renovate for automating my dependancy updates. I've been using it quite extensively - at Giant Swarm, with my personal infrastructure and with k8s.social - to keep things up-to-date in the various Kubernetes clusters I manage. This has been working great for container images and Helm charts, with both being managed via GitOps and Renovate automating the version updates via PRs, but I have now found myself wanting to automate the updating of the Kubernetes version for my Civo cluster. Renovate doesn't have built in support for this but we can make it work with the use of custom datasources!
I’ve recently been seeing some stability issues with Redis that I have running for the k8s.social Mastodon instances. After looking into it I realised that I had it configured in a master/replica architecture but I wasn’t actually making any use of the replicas as Mastodon was configured to do everything via the master. There’s two things wrong with this - firstly I’m wasting resources by having the replicas running but more importantly I created a single point of failure. When the Redis master went down, so did Mastodon.
This post is based on a webinar i've previously given where I go through some of my favourite tips for working with Kubernetes clusters all day long. The goal of all of these techniques is to make my life easier and (hopefully) less error prone. I start off with the first 5 tips being applicable to anyone working with Kubernetes and can be picked up right away. From there I move on to a couple that would benefit from having some old-skool Linux sys-admin experience. Finally I finish of with some more advanced techniques that require some previous programming experience.
