What I learned from Erlang about Resiliency in Systems Design
Failure in computer systems is inevitable. Adopting Erlang's philosophy of "Let it crash" at the many layers of abstractions in software can have a huge positive impact on resiliency. »
Fixing the Hugo Twitter Shortcode
Shortcodes in Hugo come in handy when you don't want to mess with a lot of HTML boilerplate. Sometimes though, you might want a little different behavior than what the default shortcodes provide. Here's a quick fix for the Twitter shortcode to suppress the thread view. »
Events, the DNA of Kubernetes
I see a lot of people having problems to understand how the Kubernetes platform works at the fundamental level, e.g. resiliency and behavior. If you start thinking about Kubernetes as a fully event-driven system, there's answers to so many "Why"'s »
12 Fractured Apps (Reloaded)
Three years ago Kelsey Hightower wrote a great article on how to refactor your applications correctly when going "cloud-native". A customer visit this week put me back in time, as the challenge was to containerize JBoss instances synchronizing via NFS... »
Tips for Your First Kubecon Presentation
Congratulations! Your first presentation at an amazing conference was accepted and you are super excited. Now the work starts and I might have some useful tips for you to not get lost on your way. »
When Twitter Likes become your Bookmarks
If you're like me, you might (mis)use Twitter's Like button as a way to bookmark important tweets. Once you've reached several hundred or thousands of bookmarks, ehm Likes, it becomes really hard to find what you're looking for. Mainly because Twitter Likes are not designed for this type of use and the twitter.com UI search is not super flexible. However, with some CLI magic, we can easily fix that :) »
Understanding and using the Kubernetes PodNodeSelector Admission Controller
During a recent customer engagement, a discussion about Kubernetes `NodeSelectors` came up. There was some confusion about whether and how to use them for a multi-tenant cluster deployment. In the end, we decided to leverage the Kubernetes `PodNodeSelector` admission controller. »
Inside Docker's "FROM scratch"
Statically compiled languages, like Go, are quiet popular these days. In combination with another blockbuster technology, Docker containers, a big advantage is the minimal size of the resulting container image. This can be achieved by using the special Docker "scratch" image. But how does it look like inside "FROM scratch"? [continue to read] »
QoS, "Node allocatable" and the Kubernetes Scheduler
Answering a customer question about why "Allocatable" resources (CPU, MEM) on the Kubelet would not be reduced when he starts pods with QoS guarantees. This is a deep dive in the Kubernetes scheduler... [continue to read] »
Kubernetes and the fine art of scaling - UP!
Distributed runtime (i.e. Kubernetes) optimization. The idea was mainly about day two operations for distributed systems written for and running on Kubernetes. We were mainly interested in how the platform can optimize the applications (services) it hosts. [continue to read] »