Putting the CRD in Christmas Decorations

It’s a few days in to the holiday shutdown at work, so I’ve been enjoying some downtime with my family at home. There’s been plenty of last-minute shopping, gift wrapping, baking, and, evidently, building operators with the Operator SDK. For the unaquainted, the Operator Framework is a toolkit that makes it easy to manage complex applications on top of Kubernetes. While I’ve had the chance to use the Go SDK for a few projects, I’ve recently been reading more about Ansible operators. Ansible operators allow you use Ansible roles to configure an application and respond to any changes to its Kubernetes resources. An Ansible operator allows you to handle complex scenarios just like the Go SDK, but lets you use the familiar Ansible syntax (no Go code required) and take advantage of the large Ansible module ecosystem. While operators are designed to manage resources inside Kubernetes, they also do a great job at managing resources outside of the cluster such as TLS certificates or even external monitoring checks. As I was thinking of a good first Ansible operator, I looked up from my couch and saw my Christmas tree. I already had many of my Christmas lights integrated with Home Assistant, so why not take advantage of the easy-to-use REST API and automate my Christmas lights? ...

December 24, 2019 · 6 min · Patrick Easters

Deploying memcached in a StatefulSet with OpenShift

Over the past few months at Red Hat, I’ve been working with my team on streamlining our CI/CD process and migrating some of our applications into OpenShift. As we’ve been slowly moving apps, it’s been a great opportunity to revisit some of the basics of our architecture and look at ways we can better use OpenShift to . What may have worked well in a VM-based deployment doesn’t necessarily translate well into a container-based deployment. For the sake of this post, I’ll be showing how we use a recently stable feature of OpenShift (and Kubernetes) to deploy memcached for one of our Ruby apps on the Red Hat Customer Portal. ...

May 3, 2018 · 7 min · Patrick Easters

Using Traefik with TLS on Kubernetes

Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Kubernetes a lot as Ayetier has been making the shift towards container orchestration. As easy as it was to create and scale services, it was a bit frustrating to see how most reverse proxy solutions seemed kludgy at best. That’s why I was pretty intrigued when I first read about Traefik — a modern reverse proxy supporting dynamic configuration from several orchestration and service discovery backends, including Kubernetes. ...

August 16, 2016 · 4 min · Patrick Easters