Tag: ruby

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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Waylon: A New Bot Framework

Sure, it might not be obvious why the world needs yet another bot framework, but I’m working on one. The idea is to make a scalable, intuitive, and feature-rich framework that runs on the latest Ruby. Long-running tasks shouldn’t be a problem and the framework should make things like caching a breeze. Permissions are a first-class concept, as are features like threaded replies, reactions, blocks (for rich-text responses), and support for more than just chat input. Enter Waylon: a bot framework built with these concepts (and more) in mind.

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Solving Physical Puzzles with Ruby

Most of the time, challenges I tackle with Ruby solve code-related problems. This includes things like web services, scripts, chatbots, etc., all of which are virtual in some way. Recently though, I decided to solve a puzzle in the real world.

My son was trying to put together a wooden puzzle. It requires having four colors (blue, green, red, and yellow) each present on all four sides of a rectangle. These colors are on wooden cubes that can be rotated. So four cubes, each with six sides to rotate around. It turns out that this means there are a lot of possible combinations of these cubes, most of which won’t work. By my math, there are six sides that can face up (a “y” axis), multiplied by four possible rotations around that axis (6 * 4 = 24) for each cube. Raised to the power of the four cubes (24^4 = 331776). After about 30 minutes of hearing his frustration, I told him “I bet I can solve this puzzle with some code” but he was skeptical.

I took that as a challenge to both my coding skills and his respect for me as his dad, so I obliged. After finishing, I figured it would be worth sharing.

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RSpec Testing for Ruby AWS Lambda Functions

Recently, I wrote an AWS Lambda function at work in Ruby but I didn’t have a handy tool for creating a project skeleton like bundle gem does. That means nothing bootstrapped my testing for me. While copy+pasting code into pry proved that my simple function worked, that wasn’t quite good enough. What I really wanted was the ability to use RSpec with my Lambda code. After a cursory search of the Internet for some examples, I was left disappointed with how little I found. So, I rolled up my sleeves and figured it out.

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Meet Bullion, An ACMEv2 Certificate Authority

I’m a huge fan of Let’s Encrypt and what they’ve done to secure the Internet. They’ve made safe communication free and open. Through their ACME protocol (and subsequent ACMEv2 protocol), they have changed PKI and the way we look at automating certificate provisioning for good. All that said, Let’s Encrypt only really helps for public-facing services; for internal domains and services, I want a solution that doesn’t require creating public records. I also don’t want to reinvent all the tooling; I want to be able to use ACMEv2 (through things like cert-manager on Kubernetes or certbot for EC2). Enter Bullion, an unassuming Ruby ACMEv2 Certificate Authority built specifically for internal domains.

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Rewriting Ruby’s #pack and #unpack Methods in Crystal

In Ruby, especially while writing low-level protocols, you may have encountered Array#pack() and/or String#unpack(). If you’ve ever experimented with them, they may seem mysterious; they take a cryptic string as a parameter (maybe something like C4 or w*) and seem to return gibberish (or, conversely, convert gibberish into something humans can understand). I’m not going to go into tons of detail, nor am I going to cover every format that these methods accept, but I’ll cover a few that I’ve used.

What led me to writing this post was actually some recent experimenting that I’ve been doing with Crystal. I’m trying my hand at writing a simple BER parser/encoder as a part of my journey to writing an LDAP library for Crystal. The lack of an LDAP library is honestly the biggest reason I haven’t used Crystal for more things. Since BER is a binary method of encoding, the Ruby LDAP BER code uses a ton of Array#pack() and String#unpack(). Unfortunately, Crystal doesn’t have analogous methods for its Array class or String struct so I’ve had to write my own.

Here, I’ll describe a few of the formats supported by #pack and write some compatible examples in Crystal.

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Redis, Ruby, and Some Surprising Uses

Any developer worth their salt knows that Redis is great for caching. As an in-memory cache, it gets the job done. You certainly don’t have to take my word for it; the major sponsors of Redis (redislabs) wrote a white paper to explain it. What isn’t quite as widely known is that Redis has some other uses worth considering. I’ll list the ones I’m aware of (and have used) which are all available with open-source Redis.

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