Blog Posts

Below please find all my blog posts, newest to oldest.

Getting Down With The Kubernetes Krew

Getting Down With The Kubernetes Krew

Some handy kubectl plugins found through the kubernetes plugin manager krew

<p>In this post, after a brief intro to what <strong>krew</strong> actually <strong>is</strong>, 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!</p>
Squeezing GKE System Resources In Small Clusters

Squeezing GKE System Resources In Small Clusters

Trying to create as much usable Compute in a tiny GKE cluster as possible, by squeezing its system resources

<p> <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/cDwZ40Lj9eo">Photo by Davide Ragusa on Unsplash</a></p>
KubeCon - Reflections

KubeCon - Reflections

KubeCon 2019, Barcelona - my reflections on the conference as a whole

<p>Barcelona night skyline - taken from Riot Games’ website</p>
KubeCon - Other Cool Things

KubeCon - Other Cool Things

Some of the other tool things I learnt at KubeCon that don't fit neatly into other posts!

<p>Yes, this was a wall of donuts to celebrate Kubernetes 5th birthday!</p>
KubeCon - Service Meshes

KubeCon - Service Meshes

A potential solution for dealing with your lovingly crafted and delightfully distributed service mess

<p>So, why service meshes? <del>Because I am architect, and architects are born to love service meshes.</del> 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.</p>
KubeCon - Observability

KubeCon - Observability

Because without observability, well, you really just can't see what's going on

<p>One of the (many) topics I was keen to get into while at KubeCon was <strong>observability</strong>. 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.</p>
KubeCon - The Keynotes

KubeCon - The Keynotes

My summary & thoughts from some of the keynote presentations whilst over at KubeCon 2019 in Barcelona

<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY">Dan Kohn’s talk</a> starts with a screenshot of the game Civ VI - <em>who doesn’t want to see a turn-based strategy game reference in a talk to nearly 8,000 <del>IT professionals</del> geeks</em> - he is emphasising the idea that in the game you could not train Knights without first discovering Stirrups.</p>
A Year in Google Cloud

A Year in Google Cloud

An overview of our journey from migrating our first enterprise-scale application to Google Cloud, through to multi-tenant Kubernetes

<p>This blog entry was originally <a href="https://medium.com/john-lewis-software-engineering/a-year-in-google-cloud-4586a117f352">posted on Medium</a> for my employer.</p>