Kubernetes on Sander Knape

Measure your golden signals with GKE Managed Prometheus and the nginx-ingress

Mon, 23 May 2022 08:47:02 +0200

Getting started with setting up proper monitoring dashboards for your application and infrastructure can be challenging. Where to begin? My typical answer to such a question would be to start with the “Golden Signals”. This blog post will dive into the golden signals and share how you can get started with these signals in Google Cloud using Managed Prometheus and the nginx-ingress controller.

The Golden Signals #

The four golden signals - coined by the Google SRE book - can be considered a guide as to what at least to monitor for your applications. The golden signals are:

Running self-hosted GitHub Actions runners in your Kubernetes cluster

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 09:23:33 +0200

Last year November GitHub released GitHub Actions, a CI/CD solution build on top of GitHub’s Source Code Management. GitHub Actions is very convenient to use when your source code is already stored in GitHub as no additional tool is required for your CI/CD requirements. This blog is for example updated through a GitHub Actions workflow whenever I push an update to my GitHub repository (like I just did with this post).

Earlier this year GitHub released support for self-hosted runners. These runners run in your own infrastructure which has several advantages. Especially useful is the fact that these runners can access any private resources in your infrastructure such as staging environments for automated testing or secret/artifact management solutions not exposed publicly.

Improving Kubernetes deployments with Helm

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 22:47:02 +0200

I recently blogged about automated deployments to Kubernetes using GitLab. One of the steps required when automating deployments is replacing the Docker tag with the correct value in the Kubernetes Deployment. In that blog post, this looks like the following:

deployment.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  [...]
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
          image: sanderknape/go-hello-world:<VERSION>
  [...]

The <VERSION> string is then replaced in the GitLab pipeline as follows:

sed -i "s/<VERSION>/${CI_COMMIT_SHORT_SHA}/g" deployment.yaml

This grabs the short SHA hash of the current Git commit that is checked out. Earlier in the pipeline, a Docker image has been built and tagged with that SHA, and pushed to a Docker registry.

Using Kubernetes Helm to push ConfigMap changes to your Deployments

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 08:47:02 +0200

In recent years Kubernetes has quickly gained a lot of popularity and it currently has huge momentum. Adoption is rising while at the same time, new users find out the areas where Kubernetes is still lacking.

One such area is the lifecycle management of application configuration. The construct in Kubernetes to store such configuration is the ConfigMap. These ConfigMaps can be referenced from Pods or Deployments and the values can be injected to the container using environment variables or files through volumes.

Automated deployments to Kubernetes with GitLab

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 13:47:02 +0200

In this blog post we’ll go through the steps of creating an automated deployment pipeline for Kubernetes using GitLab. In the end we’ll have a simple Go application running that very excitingly returns “Hello, World!”.

Prerequisites #

Before we can begin our quest for automation, we’ll need to set up some tools. Many alternatives of course exist to the tools that I pick. Feel free to use any other option, but make sure to make any necessary changes if you are following along with this post.