Tag: kubernetes

Kubernetes Controllers via Metatron (Part 3)

Previously, in Part 1 I described Kubernetes Controllers and the Operator pattern. In Part 2, I explained why Controllers are important and how Metacontroller makes it easier to build them in your favorite language.

In this, the 3rd and final part of this series, I’ll show off Metatron, which is my Ruby-based approach to building Metacontrollers. We’ll walk through building a basic CompositeController responsible for a custom Blog Kubernetes resource. I’m still working on the gem, but this should be a good demonstration of its capabilities and how easy it is to get started. Much of this post is a recap from Part 2, but it seems worthwhile to present it all together.

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Kubernetes Controllers via Metatron (Part 2)

Previously in Part 1, I discussed what Kubernetes Controllers are, how they work, and gave some examples of their usage. I also gave a description of Operators and explained how they are just a specific kind of Controller. All this in the service of explaining what my new gem Metatron is and how it is helpful.

Here, in Part 2 of this series, I’ll describe Metacontroller, including what it is, how it is helpful, and how it relates to Metatron for creating new Controllers.

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Kubernetes Controllers via Metatron (Part 1)

I recently released a new Ruby gem called Metatron. This gem aims to make it very easy to create Kubernetes controllers, either to implement the Operator pattern or to respond to events related to built-in resource types. It does this by deferring to Metacontroller for the Kubernetes API interactions and handling the boilerplate work of providing the JSON API it expects. To be clear, Metacontroller does most of the heavy lifting here. It provides some fantastic examples for creating various kinds of controllers, but sadly none of them are Ruby-based. This really seems like a great place for Ruby to shine. So, I decided to roll up my sleeves and get to work on that.

I touched on a lot of advanced Kubernetes topics in that short paragraph. It might not be clear precisely what value Metatron is adding to the equation, so I’m going to dive deep into the concept of Kubernetes controllers, Metacontroller, and finally Metatron itself in a three-part miniseries. Buckle up and prepare to learn lots about Kubernetes!

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Cert Manager, NAT Loopback, and CoreDNS

I recently ran into an interesting issue with my home Kubernetes environment that runs my blog. As I mentioned in a previous post, I run my blog on k3s and I use cert-manager to manage my SSL certificates provided by Let’s Encrypt. Let’s say that I’ve temporarily changed my Internet provider and along with it, my router. This router does not appear to support NAT Loopback. The cert-manager documentation acknowledges the issue but doesn’t provide much of a solution. Cert-manager couldn’t renew my blog’s certificate because its self-check kept failing. I managed to solve the issue through a fairly simple CoreDNS change. Let’s take a look.

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Kubernetes Node Affinity and EBS Volumes

Occasionally, Kubernetes workloads require specialized nodes. Sometimes it’s for machine learning, or to save money through burstable node types, or maybe just to lock certain Pods to a dedicated subset of nodes. Thankfully, Kubernetes offers a few useful mechanisms to inform the scheduler how we’d like our workloads distributed: node-based or pod-based affinity rules along with taints and tolerations. I’ll go over how to use these briefly, but I use these frequently at work for numerous reasons. Recently, I realized something interesting about how Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) work with dynamically provisioned storage like EBS volumes (meaning volumes that are created automatically by Kubernetes based on a StorageClass, rather than referencing existing volumes). The default behavior of a StorageClass is to immediately create a volume as soon as the PVC is created. This can have some consequences when trying to guide how Pods are scheduled.

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Redirecting Domains on a Traefik Ingress

I recently posted about my experience with k3s and how I’m now using it to run my blog. I also mentioned my blog’s new domain and how I’m keeping the old name working. That involved changing the Ingress resource for my blog, so I’ll show how I updated it to accept the old domains and automatically redirect to my preferred domain without needing to make WordPress itself do any redirecting.

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Blogging on Kubernetes

It has been a while since I last posted, but between college, work, and kids, I’ve been pretty busy. That said, I recently attended KubeCon 2019 and saw a lot of interesting presentations. As a fan of Rancher, I gravitated toward a lot of their talks. One that really caught my attention was Darren Shepherd’s talk on k3s. I really liked what I saw; it made setting up Kubernetes really easy, lightened the dependency load for small clusters, but still is very much the right amount of “batteries included” like most things made by Rancher.

I decided to move my home server (which runs, among other things, this blog) to k3s. Here, I’ll walk through how I did it — at least specifically for running a WordPress blog — just to demonstrate how easy it is. Fair warning though, there is a lot of YAML ahead!

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