Since my first tentative steps in to Kubernetes it’s been an interesting journey. For the most part I suspect the most common way to interact with Kubernetes is to use a managed platform through one of the main public cloud players (that’s certainly been my experience), but it doesn’t do a lot to understand the nuts and bolts of the platform. I’d been meaning to try and get stuck in . . .
If, like me, you’ve come from a traditional sysadmin background then Kubernetes can be daunting to say the least, this doesn’t get much easier when it comes to trying to get to grips with how to debug networking issues. Kubernetes networking is VAST and supports a number of complex implementations that vary between the major Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms (GKE, EKS, AKS) as well as many other options. The broad strokes are . . .
Earlier in the year I wrote about automating Elastic Kubernetes Service role configuration (direct modification of the aws-auth ConfigMap) using Terraform, keeping the ARN data secret by looking it up from a secret management service (in this case Hashicorp Vault). Whilst the solution works well it comes with some built in issues when we want to provision a new deployment from scratch that aren’t obvious when we’re working with an . . .
FluentD is data collection platform and a popular choice for Kubernetes to aggregate logs. Aggregating logs is all well and good but for properly managing logs you really want to output them to a log management platform, ideally one which provides some degree of visualisation and insights, unless you really love working with raw logs it’s nice to be able to view them and see patterns in a manner that’s . . .
In a previous post we looked at the basics of working with multiple instances of Terraform providers, however as usual, Kubernetes presents some slight variations on this theme due to it’s varied options for authentication. In this post we’re looking at how to handle authentication for multiple Kubernetes clusters in Terraform. Provider Aliases Underpinning all concepts of working with multiple instances of a provider is the concept of working with . . .
One of the lesser known functions of Terraform is the ability to operate multiple instances of the same provider within the same configuration. The uses of this are various though as it’s not always needed it’s one of those things that doesn’t always leap out. It’s pretty easy to get to grips with so this is a short post to take a look at how to get started. Providers – . . .
Recently I’ve been looking at how to configure EC2 autoscaling schedules for EKS implementations, specifically delivering these schedule configurations via Terraform. This sounds like it should be rather simple on the surface but after getting the initial configuration to work an issue of idempotency presents itself. In this post I want to look at the issues presented and how to overcome them. Autoscaling Groups and Schedules When an managed EKS . . .
An often required feature of any declarative software or scripting is to work with time values. Much of the time this requirement doesn’t crawl out of the woodwork until you’ve been working with it for a while (at least that’s usually my experience). It was a relief to learn that Terraform does have this function, but the use is a little out of the ordinary and takes a bit of . . .
Recently I had an requirement that I couldn’t find documented outside of the abstract; migrating a single private DNS zone to AWS’ hosted DNS service; Route 53 and conditionally forwarding queries for that zone from an existing Windows DNS infrastructure. This isn’t something I expected to be broken down blow by blow in the AWS documentation but there are plenty of Windows DNS infrastructures out there in the wild and . . .
In a previous post we looked at setting up centralised Terraform state management using S3 for AWS provisioning (as well as using Azure Object Storage for the same solution in Azure before that). What our S3 solution lacked however is a means to achieve State Locking, I.E. any method to prevent two operators or systems from writing to a state at the same time and thus running the risk of . . .