I’ve recently been experimenting with Hashicorp’s Consul in my home infrastructure because I want to use it to provide service discovery and automatic DNS provisioning when I create Proxmox instances with Terraform. Consul is a bit of a hefty beast to get to grips with and getting DNS lookups working when you have ACLs enabled can be a little tricky – it’s taken me a day or two of going round in circles to figure…
If (like me) you happen to follow the development of the Cilium CNI plugin for Kubernetes then you’ll have seen the recent 1.10 release which included many shiny features. One exciting addition is the ability to announce Service IPs via BGP.
This blog is going to be about using Hashicorp’s Vault to issue short-lived certificates to use with SSH. Most guides have you using a username & password to authenticate with Vault, but I’ve chosen to delegate that to GitHub instead. I’m assuming you already have a Vault server running – I won’t be covering that in the course of this blog. You’ll also need a sufficiently-privileged Vault token, and jq installed on the machine you…
If you’ve been around the cloud-native world for a while, you’ll no doubt be familiar with (and quite likely already be using) Prometheus. You may however not have heard of Thanos. Put simply, Thanos takes Prometheus and makes it even more awesome.
Whilst AWS’s free S3 tier is almost certainly sufficient to store Terraform’s remote state, it may be the case that you have a requirement to keep the data on-site, or alternatively if you’re using Terraform in an air-gapped environment then you have no choice but to self-host.
Obtaining a wildcard LetsEncrypt cert with Ansible Earlier this year, LetsEncrypt made their wildcard x509 certificates available to the general public. Whilst this is a massive step forward over individual certificates for each domain, it does come with the overhead of having to distribute the wildcard certificate to the (possibly many) places you would use it. Ignoring that issue for now, I wrote a quick Ansible playbook which uses the dns-01 challenge method and my…
Having spent quite some time working on my initial modules to integrate with Memset, I’ve assembled a small list of dos and don’ts from some of my stumbling points.
A solution in need of a problem Like all good sysadmins, my personal website has been a ‘coming soon’ splash page for quite some time. According to the Wayback Machine, it’s been this way since some time in 2014. As I’m sure many can sympathise with, there are always far more interesting and shiny things to be experimenting with than building a website.
All the choices So you’re looking to start using Kubernetes, but you’re overwhelmed by the multitude of deployment options available? Judging by the length of the Picking the Right Solution section to the Kubernetes docs, it’s safe to assume that you’re not alone. Even after you’ve made it past the provisioning stage, you then need to learn how to administrate what is a very complex system. In short; Kubernetes is not easy.
When you receive a new server, there are a variety of pre-requisites required before Ansible can be used to administrate the host.