alexos.dev

GKE Compute Cost Comparisons In Small Clusters

Sun, 21 May 2023 19:00:00 -0100

I’ve been running a short-term experiment across the GKE Compute options within my “Home Lab” (read: GCP-hosted Google Kubernetes Engine) with a view to optimise for a balance between ease of operation and cost efficiency. If that sounds useful to you, then by all means read on!

Let’s dive right in with the Billing data. The chart below shows the view of costs over the course of my two-month experiment for this small GKE Cluster. I’ll be stepping across this graph to detail each experiment I ran and what led to these outcomes, as well as some of the trade-offs along the way.

Creating an up-to-date Distroless Python Image

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 13:21:00 -0100

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

In this blog post I’ll walk through the creation of a Python Docker image based on the Distroless container published by Google, but with an up-to-date version of Python and operating system updates - unlike their experimental (and unsupported) version. This image still has the same security and operational benefits - such as no shell or unnecessary OS libraries to reduce the security attack surface, and preserving the tiny image size.

Hosting Plausible Analytics on Kubernetes

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 19:21:00 -0100

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

In this blog post I’ll take you through how I set up the web analytics software Plausible on my own Kubernetes cluster. Whilst Plausible do publish guidance on how to do this, I found that it needed a few tweaks and I wanted to make a few enhancements to get it working reliably enough for my needs.

If you haven’t heard of Plausible, I’ll keep it brief. It’s a lightweight more privacy-conscious version of Google Analytics. I personally use it on the handful of non-profit websites I host outside of my work (including this one!) and think it’s great. It does not have all the bells and whistles of GA but what it does have is:

Docker Desktop Alternatives for M1 Mac

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 19:21:00 -0100

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash

In this blog post I’m going to talk through my recent experiences as I attempted to ditch Docker Desktop - the licensing changes that come into effect at the end of January being the primary motivator.

Without going into any detail about it, let’s just say I’m not a fan of taking something that you’ve made freely available previously and deciding that you now want to charge for it!

Developer-Friendly Runbooks: A Guide

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 19:28:00 -0100

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

When things go wrong - and yes, they will go wrong - it’s extremely helpful to have easy access to a set of runbooks to guide the unfortunate engineer through the steps needed to mitigate the problem as swiftly as possible. In this post I’m going to describe the approach we use for this where I work, which we’ve found to work very well.

Some Musings From KubeCon EU 2021 (Virtual Edition)

Wed, 12 May 2021 18:48:00 +0100

I’ve just finished binging on a whole host of talks from KubeCon EU 2021, and thought I’d scribble down some of my immediate thoughts - from the talks I “went” to, as well as more generally about virtual conferencing these days. Which is a bit of a change of pace, let’s be honest.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

I should caveat this post with the obvious - my experiences are heavily based around how I chose to take in the conference - the sessions I picked, the things I got involved with and the things I didn’t. Conferences for me tend to be focused on learning about or picking up tips on bits of technology or techniques that I already have some idea about in the first place, rather than totally new things that I don’t think I’m going to have any practical use for in my current line of work. I’m also not that great at the “networking” thing 😅

Tools To Visualise Your Kubernetes Cluster

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 18:22:00 -0100

Photo by fabio on Unsplash

In this post I’m going to discuss a couple of tools I’ve used to help visualise workloads deployed on my Kubernetes clusters. The tools I’ll be looking at are:

Kube Ops View
WeaveWorks Scope

I’ll also finish by discussing some of the other approaches I am yet to try fully, but which might be better alternatives for larger clusters.

Background

I have been on-off interested in tools to help visualise all the things running on a Kubernetes cluster since I first got involved in Kubernetes. A bash script that hacks together a bit of kubectl to dump out the pods on each node (and also the built-in tools in the Google Cloud Console, since I use GKE) was an early creation that did a good enough job of satisfying my curiosity, but this is naturally hard to read and maintain.

How to connect to Google Kubernetes clusters in parallel

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 18:00:00 -0100

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

In this post I’m going to talk through the approach I use to switch between multiple Google Kubernetes Engine clusters on the command line. I’d expect a lot of the stuff in here has some benefit for non-GCP Kubernetes clusters too, but the ones I use on a day-to-day basis are all hosted there.

Key outcomes for me were:

To be able to switch from one cluster to another with only a small number of commands, even if I have to authenticate with different user accounts (as primarily a GCP user, this means different email addresses / GCP projects).
To be connected to different Kubernetes in different windows - for example tailing logs in a Prod & Non-Prod cluster at the same time - and for that connection to persist across multiple kubectl commands.

Spoiler Alert: I solved this with a bit of fiddling of ~/.kube/config plus the marvellous kubie.

Things I Have Learnt After A Year As A Lead Engineer

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 19:00:00 -0100

It’s probably natural to get a bit contemplative as one year rolls into another. In this post I’m going to spend a little time writing about some of the things I’ve learnt after a year moving into a “Senior Engineer” position, and then onto some of the things I hope to change going forwards, based on what I’ve learnt.

As a result, this post is going to be a bit introspective and not very technical - hopefully it won’t come across as too self-indulgent! I personally think it’s sometimes interesting to read about things from this perspective, but feel free to turn back now if that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea! 🍵

Team Nimbus and the Agents of Chaos

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 18:00:00 -0100

This blog post is about my team’s first ever Chaos Day - where we ran a series of experiments designed to test how our platform performed when we tried to disrupt it, or the workloads that run on it.

This entry was originally posted on Medium under my employer’s publication.

It was January 2020, and we had just gone through another Peak trading period - significant for a larger retailer. The Digital Platform had performed extremely well. There were no incidents, no last-minute panic scaling, and no fall-backs enabled — even though the number of services and overall complexity of the platform was significantly higher than this time last year. Not perhaps the backdrop to make a compelling case for running a series of complex operational test scenarios then? Well, we are not the sort to be resting on our laurels …

Getting Down With The Kubernetes Krew

Sat, 29 Feb 2020 18:00:00 -0100

In this post, after a brief intro to what krew actually is, I run through a dozen or so plugins I’ve installed using it which I find to be pretty handy time-savers. Hope you find at least one of them useful!

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

So, long time no post. I was resolved to posting more frequently in 2020 … and we’re at the end of February … so not so successfully then! Time to try to turn the tide …

Squeezing GKE System Resources In Small Clusters

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 18:00:00 -0100

Photo by Davide Ragusa on Unsplash

Spoiler Alert! This blog is really about Vertical Pod Autoscaling and patching of kube-system workloads in GKE. It just might not sound like it at the start 😄 If you’re not interested in how I got there and just want to jump to the good stuff - I’ve summarised it at the bottom of the post.

So, this all started because I wanted to try out Elasticsearch. I’m not the biggest fan of GCP’s Stackdriver Logging, and I wanted to poke around with some alternatives. I have a “personal” GKE cluster that I use to run a few websites (including this blog!), and where I also experiment with these sort of things outside of work. Should be straight-forward I thought to myself. Sure, Elastic is Java - but I don’t need it to do that much, I’ll just shrink it down enough that it’ll start up ok, play around a bit, and then maybe see if I want to do more with it or sign up to a managed logging service instead.

KubeCon - Reflections

Fri, 24 May 2019 09:00:00 -0100

Barcelona night skyline - taken from Riot Games’ website

This blog post summarises my thoughts on a very entertaining and informative trip to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona, May 2019. It was my first trip there and I picked up a variety of useful bits ’n’ pieces while I was there.

Any Stand-out Themes?

In trying to sum things up, I find myself struggling for any stand-out themes. Thinking about this a little more, I reckon this is probably a fairly natural thing to happen when comparing to “big vendor” conferences where they have large product & marketing teams driving their goals. Here, however, is a community event of largely open source software. Even the larger commercial vendors embrace the spirit of it all. It’s actually really refreshing.

KubeCon - Other Cool Things

Thu, 23 May 2019 23:00:00 -0100

Yes, this was a wall of donuts to celebrate Kubernetes 5th birthday!

I’m going to use this blog post to talk about a couple of other things I learnt about while at KubeCon 2019. These don’t slow neatly into my other posts from my time at the conference, but I still felt they were interesting enough to call out separately.

How Changing Kubernetes Itself Works

I went to a couple of talks focusing on some proposals for improving Kubernetes itself. As well as liking the content being proposed, it was interesting to learn a little bit about how the process of making changes to Kubernetes - what is a giant open source behemoth now - actually works.

KubeCon - Service Meshes

Thu, 23 May 2019 20:00:00 -0100

So, why service meshes? ~~Because I am architect, and architects are born to love service meshes.~~ Because actually I can totally see the value of a service mesh, I just can’t quite seem to convince anyone that they’re worth biting the bullet on yet.

It’s a design pattern I’m totally sold on and just need to find the killer need for so we can start reaping some of those sweet, sweet benefits. Or crying at the complexity and brittle overlay we’ve subjected ourselves too. Maybe.

KubeCon - Observability

Thu, 23 May 2019 18:00:00 -0100

One of the (many) topics I was keen to get into while at KubeCon was observability. This is something that is just so totally and utterly crucial when running this whole “distributed microservice” thing that you really need good solutions to this stuff to make a success of it.

In the case of my team right now, we have some good stuff going on. Prometheus & Grafana are great - digging those a lot. We’re standardising some dashboards for teams that aren’t too fussed, and we’re also seeing some teams do some really funky things beyond that with their instrumented code.

KubeCon - The Keynotes

Thu, 23 May 2019 09:00:00 -0100

Intro by the CNCF Director

Dan Kohn’s talk starts with a screenshot of the game Civ VI - who doesn’t want to see a turn-based strategy game reference in a talk to nearly 8,000 ~~IT professionals~~ geeks - he is emphasising the idea that in the game you could not train Knights without first discovering Stirrups.

Civ VI Tech Tree

He builds on this with further “real” examples of two people independently discovering things - he uses the examples of Facebook (watch the film the Social Network if you’re not sure about this reference!), Natural Evolution, Calculus - the idea being that simultaneous invention is not an uncommon thing, it is triggered by a spark of creativity and - crucially for his point to land - the pre-requisite things need to be in place (such as computers and the internet, in the case of Facebook).

Privacy

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 15:28:51 +0000

If you have any questions about any of this document, please contact me.

General

All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information. These terms and conditions of use are subject to change at any time and without notice.

A Year in Google Cloud

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 15:28:51 +0000

This blog entry was originally posted on Medium for my employer.

This time last year, our newly-formed Platforms Team in John Lewis Online were putting the finishing touches to a brand new Kubernetes platform designed to run the frontend of johnlewis.com in Google Cloud. Twelve months later, we’ve passed through Black Friday without a hitch and built a raft of new capabilities along the way. What follows is a post reflecting on the journey so far — if that sounds interesting, then read on!

About Me