Today I added a harddisk I had lying around because I needed some more space. On my Arch Linux system I have all my drives encrypted like a good boy. It can be a bit tricky when you are adding them because you need to configure a few different files and add different UUID’s in each of them. Here are the steps I follow to add a new disk. Note that this how to assumes that you already have set up your system with dm-crypt. ...
As a DevOps or Cloud engineer, you work with many different technologies daily. Therefore, a good engineer needs a solid foundation in Linux, a lot of knowledge about your cloud solution, networking, CI/CD, at least one programming language, and many other topics. Not only are there many of these categories, but within these categories, there are several alternatives. For example, in the category of infrastructure management, there is Ansible, Puppet, or Chef, each with its particular approach and configuration methods. ...
When you learn about DevOps, you will come across the concept of a container early on. This is a “Mischa Explains” article where I attempt to explain a concept in my own words as simply as possible. I use the Feynman technique and pretend to explain it to a 12-year-old. Virtualization To understand containers, we need to understand virtualization. Virtualization is the process of creating “fake computers” or “virtual computers” on a physical computer. ...
TLDR It took me 80 hours of studying to gain this certification. Here are my notes and Anki deck: GitHub repo Introduction When I did my English degree at University, exams were usually handwritten essays that needed to be done within a 3-hour timeframe. Sometimes we had multiple-choice tests, and I would always consider them a guaranteed pass because multiple-choice was much easier in my experience. That opinion has changed since I’ve obtained a few IT certifications. These tests are hard! I’m typing this while sitting on the bus on my way home from my AZ-104 exam. I passed with an 860 score of 1000, where 700 or higher is a pass. But it was an astonishingly tough exam. Usually, I finish quickly and spend at least half an hour reviewing my answers. I had only 5 minutes to review my questions this time because I had used up all of the available time. The questions required intense concentration and were time-consuming because I needed to compare many options which were very similar to each other. There were no easy questions. ...
This weekend I had a lot of fun with a project. I wanted to learn more about GitOps and try out ArgoCD. My goal was to be able to deploy an application from a GitHub repo to my local Kubernetes cluster running in minikube. There are many options I could have used, such as running Jenkins in my cluster. But I wanted to use Azure pipelines for practice, which complicates the deployment to my local cluster, because the cluster is not running on Azure. I also wanted to try out ArgoCD and learn more about GitOps. ...
Introduction Have you ever thought about your identity on the internet? How does LinkedIn know it is you when you log in to LinkedIn? And when you allow LinkedIn to post to your Twitter, how does LinkedIn access your account and not your kindergarten teacher’s account? This is a “Mischa Explains” article where I attempt to explain a concept in my own words as simply as possible. I use the Feynman technique and pretend to explain it to a 12-year-old. ...
I came across this little book while doing some research for my Jiro Dreams of Sushi article. While scanning the book’s description, I was intrigued by this sentence: “the happiness of always being busy.” Although I work hard every day, I also enjoy ticking off the last item on my to-do list and enjoying some rest. Is there more happiness in being in constant activity? Ikigai “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” ...
This book is the sequel to the Phoenix project. Both books are set at Parts Unlimited, a fictitious company that supplies car parts to DIY mechanics and repair shops. Phoenix is a new system that Parts Unlimited has worked on for multiple years. It is supposed to handle order processing and communication between manufacturing, stores, and clients. Phoenix will also play a role in sales and marketing. The company has been gathering customer data for years, but it cannot use any of this data yet. Phoenix will enable it to generate targeted marketing campaigns from the data when it’s finished. ...
Last week I watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” again. It must be the eighth time I revisited this piece of art. I have very little interest in sushi, but there is much more to this documentary. It was first recommended to me by my good friend Anders more than five years ago, but I couldn’t grasp its underlying life lessons the first time around. Even though I couldn’t fully understand the message, I was intrigued by it and kept returning to the documentary. Over the years, I managed to grasp more of its deeper meaning. The documentary is about Jiro: one of the best sushi chefs in the world. His tiny restaurant, located in a subway station, even received a 3 Michelin star rating. So how does a man operating from a subway restaurant become the best in the world? And what can a DevOps Engineer learn from a sushi chef? ...
If you are just starting your Linux journey, you might have noticed that a few camps exist in the Linux world. Just like in any other area of life, it seems that groups of human beings enjoy dividing themselves instead of living in harmony. There are camps centered around Linux distributions (I use Arch, btw) but also around text editors. The Beginning The reason why I started to use vim is rather practical. When I was studying to become a Cloud Engineer, I had access to subscriptions on AWS and Azure to experiment with virtual machines. This was a perfect place to learn to work with Ansible. Many of the labs projects I did involved setting up a few virtual machines, and I destroyed many VMs when I made some big mistakes in the configuration. ...