Marcus Noble

I run several bots that post to social media and the number seems to keep growing. I've had a few people in the past ask me how I run them so I thought I'd finally get around to writing down how I manage it by leveraging Node-RED.

I have a habit of automating as much of my life as I can. As part of that I have some small automations that handle posting to social media automatically when I publish a new blog post. (More on this in a future post). In the past this was Twitter but that is dead so these days I post to my Mastodon and Bluesky accounts automatically whenever a new blog post is available on my website. Maybe that's how you ended up here today! One platform I had been avoiding for a long time was LinkedIn. I had the impression that they didn't have a free, personal API available for users to use to post status updates. Well, turns out I was mistaken and it's actually not too difficult to setup, there's just a LOT of outdated information out there. So lets fix this...

Last week I announced the launch of a new project I've been working on - Cloud Native Now - a new monthly newsletter that will provide a roundup of all the happenings in the cloud native world. This newsletter is my attempt at keeping myself, and others, up-to-date on all the latest news, tools and events happening in the cloud native world. A new issue will be published each month on the last Friday of that month and contain a roundup of articles, announcements, tools, tutorials, events and CFPs relating to cloud native technologies and the community.

As part of a side project I'm currently working on I needed to spin up a new Kubernetes cluster that I could manage via GitOps. I decided to take this opportunity to take a look at OpenTofu and see how it handles as it's been several years now since I last used Terraform. My plan was to use OpenTofu to scaffold a fairly basic Civo Kubernetes cluster and then use Flux to handle installing workloads into the cluster. It took me a little trial-and-error so I thought I'd write up my final setup to help others avoid the issues and to help my future self when I come to do this again in a couple years!

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.