The newbie cloud architect diary

Terraform is an Infrastructure-as-Code framework that is used to provision network, storage and computing resources on (nearly) any Cloud environment. The weekly mood I am back from vacation while many colleagues are still on leave. It has the advantage for me to review my past achievements, potentially go back to some topics I had not yet well understood or remembered, and think about further plans. I realize how much difficult it is to build my network and catch-up with projects when working from home. Naturally, I spend more time reading than chatting, which has the consequence than I don't learn anybody or anything by hazard, only on purpose. Also, I wonder a bit about my goals and areas of focus which are still disparate between concrete use-cases and general practices.  I still have to get more confident with DevOps therefore I am now looking at Terraform. What is Terraform Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code (IaC aka. "InfraCode") software tool cre...

Knative is a serverless framework for Service-Mesh and Event-Mesh architectures that make it easier to run elastic applications in Kubernetes. The daily mood I am just starting to realise how much my work life has changed with my "new" job. No more technical marketing, only questionable facts. No more Business trips, only Home-office. No more telephone calls, only Slack chats. No more productivity tools like Trello  and Todoist , only "old-school"  Jira projects. There are also things that didn't change, like daily concerns about wether I am doing the right thing at the right time in order to perform as an employee, while protecting my work-life-balance. They are actually days in and days out, which people might count so or so... Provided that my organisation is currently pivoting its business and technology, automation is the key. Today is our 2nd post around Cloud native and we are looking at Serverless in the context of Microservices and Kubernetes, or the...

FluxCD GitOps operator supports Kustomize for dynamically featuring Kubernetes resources includind HelmRelease. This post is about auto-deployment. The daily mood Another week is over and I have made good progress on this project around Helm chart deployment automation. As described in my last posts, we've been using Flux Helm Operator for abstracting Helm installation, and Kustomize for building custom configurations.  Now we will look at how Flux can integrate with Kustomize. At the end we'll actually get a picture which is not common, indeed we'll use FluxCD GitOps operator in conjonction with Helm operator, but disconnected from each other. Like for a connected mode, the solution should allow to automatically and bi-directionnaly sync a configuration change either in the Git repo (Flux HelmRelease + Kustomize), or on the Kubernetes cluster (Released Helm charts). Requirements An empty Git repository Assets from my previous post on Flux Helm Operator + Kustomize A Kuber...

Provisioning, operating and maintaining distributed apps requires fine grained capacity planning, objective definition and consumption monitoring. The daily mood We had an interesting meeting with the team about API security, then I had my 1-1 with my Manager. He suggested that I move from tutorial applications to real world applications when evaluating Helm chart composition tools like Helmfile, Kustomize, and others. Which I will probably start with tomorrow. In the mean time I am also ramping up on  observability , or the practice of designing systems and applications with the perception that someone needs to watch them.​ As a growing provider of Platform services, our R&D organization must obviously care about monitoring resource metrics and component logs, but it's easier to say than to do. We define 3 levels of observability: Foundation supports better operations Core supports better usability Intelligence supports better automation This post talks about monitoring in ...

Helmfile is a declarative spec and client tool that enables better composition, configuration and deployment of multiple Helm charts, than Umbrellas. The daily mood If find it a great practice that my peers often use our team call to share what they are about to present to our internal customers, that is to say our Product Management (PM) team or Chief Technology Officer (CTO). They usually show only 2-3 slides from a larger presentation for which they are unsure or required feedback. The occasion for me to get familiar with diverse topics e.g. API versioning lifecycle, Security, Observability. I am also impressed how fast the other members of the team can connect with a core problem or solution without a reminder on the context, and then ask important questions. In my experience of customer-facing, presentations always started with a hook and reference, in order to get attention and credibility on what you are going to present next (cf. Great Demo from Peter Cohan, Talk like Ted fro...

Kustomize is a native, declarative, template-free and comprehensive approach to composition, customisation and patch of any Kubernetes resource. The daily mood We had another meeting with developers on Friday afternoon about the migration project I had been involved in a week ago. We talked about the use of a Kubernetes DEV cluster offering a Hybrid deployment mode (as discussed in a  previous post ). I learnt about significant limitations due to natural differences in the architecture and components between DEV and PROD, which confused me a bit. At the end unfortunately, I will not be able to support this initiative actively, and rather let the experts proceed. Regarding my work, I realised that it was not convenient to share and read larger pieces of code within my posts so I created a GitHub account dedicated to this blog , and will try to catch up with all previous assets soon. Since I was already using a personal GitHub account and want this blog to stay anonymous for now, I f...