The Cloud Native Craftsman#
Welcome to my website. I鈥檓 Mischa, a Cloud Native Engineer from Amsterdam.
Here I share thoughts and learnings about technical topics such as Microsoft
Azure, Kubernetes, Cloud Native technologies, DevOps and Linux. I’m also very
interested in anything that increases my productivity, so you will also find
writings on Zettelkasten, (Neo)vim, study techniques and anything that has to do
with taking notes.
In 2024 I was awared the Microsoft MVP title for my efforts of sharing knowledge
with the community.
Years of sharing knowledge on YouTube and this blog have uncovered a talent for
tackling difficult technical topics and explaining them in simple terms to
others.
In other words, I’ve found out that I have a knack for teaching. Following this
curiousity I started a Skool Community
where I create video courses on Kubernetes, Productivity, DevOps and much more.
My courses are also available on
Udemy
My courses have been received very well and I receive plenty of positive
feedback.
This blog is also available for your preferred RSS reader. Use
this link.
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Most Recent Posts#
I鈥檝e just released a comprehensive video delving deep into my Neovim setup and command-line centric workflow. This video is a response to the curiosity of my YouTube subscribers. It鈥檚 an all-inclusive guide from A to Z, detailing the rationale behind my configuration choices. I鈥檝e spent years perfecting my workflow and this video has been several months in the making, so I鈥檓 excited that I can finally share it with you.
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I always thought that Persistent Volume Claims where deleted when you delete the pod which they are associated with. I was wrong. The lifecycle of PVCs is independent of Pods, and their behavior is largely governed by the Reclaim Policy set on the PVs. Here鈥檚 what you need to know:
PVCs: These are requests for storage, akin to how Pods request resources like CPU and memory. They exist independently and can be bound to Pods when needed. PVs: Provisioned by administrators or dynamically through Storage Classes, PVs provide the actual storage resources. Their lifecycle is not tied to any specific Pod. Understanding Reclaim Policies The Reclaim Policy on a PV dictates its fate after a PVC is released. There are three policies to be aware of:
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In this video I set up Flux running in a local cluster on my MacBook by following the getting started guide. Then I learn about how to structure the repo according to Flux methodology. I implement this structure in my homelab repo and deploy flux to my homelab cluster. Then I manage to configure Grafana and the Weave UI to be accessbible via ingress using a custom fake domain.
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Today I learned about Cilium network policies. These are much easier to implement than normal network policies because there are some tools available when creating the cilium policies. Network policies were probably my weakest Kubernetes skill and I tended to avoid them.
But now I鈥檓 exposing some apps to the internet in my homelab and I鈥檓 forced to think about security and what would happen if a hacker managed to get root privileges in a container even though I implemented strict security contests and enabled privilege escalation.
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My ISP router only allowed me to assign 200 IP addresses and it didn鈥檛 have any possibility to create VLANS, so it was time for an upgrade to my setup.
Now that I鈥檓 hosting several clusters in my homelab and exposing things to the internet I can justify to spend the money on this hardware and the complexity of dividing up my home network into VLANS.
I bought a Unifi Express gateway and the Unifi Lite 8 PoE managed switch.
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App Gateway It has App Gateway in the name, but it is an entirely new solution. The App Gateway is the only thing it has in common with Azure Application Gateway.
Resources Two types of resources. Azure resources and k8s resources.
The App Gateway for Container is an azure resource which listens to changes in k8s resources through the ALB controller. AGWFC is the control plane.
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In this video I installed Prometheus and Grafana using helm and studied k3s networking.
My goal was to make Grafana approachable via ingress using a fake domain and after a bit of tinkering it worked.
installed prometheus and grafana with kube-prometheus-stack helm chart reflected on why I use k3s gained understanding of k3s loadbalancing solution configured /etc/hosts file to resolve to fake domain configured k3s ingress to use fake local domain struggled with ingress but figured it out in the end successfully made grafana UI available on fake local domain grafana.homelab.nl Links: 202312261012
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Last week I created my own Go program to send toots to Mastodon but now I stumbled across a full fledged CLI with a TUI
https://toot.bezdomni.net/
Links: 202312311312
This is the first video of my homelab series.
I set up the repo for my project and do the initial installation of k3s on an old laptop I had lying around. I had a k8s cluster installed on there with kubeadm which I needed to clean up first.
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This is a super useful tool to list, download and upload Grafana dashboards as json.
Currently using this to occasionally take extra-extra backups of my Grafana creations
https://software.es.net/gdg/
Links: 202312301612