In this blog post, I want to share with you how I set up secrets management for my home lab. I use my home lab to explore new technologies, but I also try to keep it in line with the practices I would use when setting up environments for clients. I focus on Microsoft Azure and the ecosystem they provide for cloud native applications. Secrets management is an important aspect of any cloud-native application, as it allows you to securely store and access sensitive information such as passwords, tokens and certificates. ...

In this video I’ll show you how to view your Strava data in Grafana by doing the following steps: creating an application in Strava installing the Strava plugin in Grafana adding the Strava data source importing dashboards exploring data and creating custom dashboard Links: 202312250812 ...

In this video I’ll be installing Prometheus and Grafana in a Kubernetes cluster running in Rancher Desktop on my MacBook. There are many options available out there but this is the easiest one I found to get up and running quickly. helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts helm repo update helm install prometheus-stack prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack --namespace=prometheus-stack --create-namespace ...

This morning I had some fun writing a Go program which takes the latest blog post from my RSS feed and posts it to Mastodon. It is based on my twitter cli I wrote a while ago. It was fun to write some Go again, it has been far too long. I’ve been writing mostly Terraform and yaml recently and working a lot with infrastructure. I haven’t been doing any projects at home that required programming. But recently I started up my personal blog and completely re-architected my social media setup. ...

Watched this very insightful talk on microservice architecture. Some things I learned: microservices should be autonomous: they should have minimal dependencies on other microservices if they have dependencies they should only be 1 layer deep a microservice should not be calling another microservice which calls another microservice dependencies can be reversed by pushing data towards the service for example: a pricing database can be dumped and pushed to a catalog service once a day data duplication is not a sin Another powerful point he made is that the architecture is a reflection from the organization’s structure. He explained that the company was organized in teams and that managers of teams were promoted based on the amount of people they managed. This meant that managers were making up services which needed people to build them, which led to a proliferation of services and dependencies. ...

I’ve been struggling with this ever since I started blogging 2 years ago (can’t believe it’s already been that long). But I’ve finally made the decision: I’m keeping this blog at mischavandenburg.com as a tech and career focused blog where I share technical knowledge and notes, and I’m starting a new personal blog at mischavandenburg.blog. I have fallen in love with blogging. Documenting my own life in writing has become a very therapeutic and valuable experience to me. Even if nobody reads what I put out into the world, it is incredibly satisfying to scroll through your own blog and go back in time to see what I was learning or doing or feeling at that time. ...

A great essay about small personal websites coded in HTML. Brings me back. https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ Links: 202312150812

Are you currently working with containerizing older Java or .NET applications? From Kubernetes 1.29, the default cgroups implementation on Azure Linux AKS nodes will be cgroupsv2. Older versions of Java, .NET and NodeJS do not support memory querying v2 memory constraints and this will lead to out of memory (OOM) issues for workloads. Please make sure that your older containerized applications are compatible with cgroupsv2 or you might be in quite some pain in the future. ...

Read an interesting Reddit thread today where commenters explained the complexities of running Kubernetes. Indeed it is easy to set up, but that is only the beginning. The real art is to build distributed systems on top of it, and it is dauntingly complex. That’s why I’m so attracted to it. It does make clear just how great Azure’s AKS offering actually is. So much of the administrative overhead is automated, and so far I’m under the impression it is done really well. Which is why I’m on a mission to become an AKS expert. ...

Grafana has developed a Helm chart which greatly simplifies the deployment of a monitoring stack to your Kubernetes clusters. It contains: kube-state-metrics, which gathers metrics about Kubernetes objects Node exporter, which gathers metrics about Kubernetes nodes OpenCost, which interprets the above to create cost metrics for the cluster, and Grafana Agent, which scrapes the above services to forward metrics to Prometheus and logs to Loki The Prometheus and Loki services may be hosted on the same cluster, or remotely (e.g. on Grafana Cloud). ...