January 10, 2023

Yak Shaving

The Kubernetes project is not looking at all like a Kubernetes project right now. I have been taking detours with everything else. I keep telling myself it has all been for the greater cause and that’s why I believe it. It turns out it takes some time if you start setting up a development environment from scratch when you want it the same way on three different operating systems and all automated. Read more

January 4, 2023

Boilerplate Day

Yesterday I stated that I want to create the devbox of the week. I have (almost) delivered on the idea today. In other words, the K8S Cube hasn’t progressed. On the other hand, I am now writing this in a freshly configured Neovim that is running in a WSL Ubuntu that was automatically automatically configured with Ansible. Also, the Windows host has the same Neovim configuration, the GUI fonts were (almost) patched and installed by Ansible there, too. Read more

January 3, 2023

Working Practices

I am a software engineering professional. This is my hobby project. This leads to a funny middle ground between compromising on some things more than I would professionally and a few things that require an extra bit level of strictness. I came up with a list of ten things I want to take into account through this project. Do a bit every day Have fun while learning I want a test lab for future projects GitOps Journaling DevBox of the week Testing CI/CD 80% proven tools Giving back Do a bit every day I reserve some of my free time to work on this project. Read more

January 3, 2023

Hardware

The K8S Cube runs on 16 Raspberry Pi single board computers. However, there are other considerations for networking, power, storage and casing that I want to go through here. Raspberries The Raspberries are a mix of models 3B+, 4B and there may be 1-2 Model 3 boards, too. BitScope Blade Rack Running up to 20 Raspberry Pis from 20 powerbricks is not a choice I wanted to make. Back in 2019 when I started my original project, I ordered a Blade Rack from the Australian company BitScope. Read more

January 3, 2023

Raspberry Pi principles

Let’s go through some of the design principles for my refurbished cluster. I got the farm of Raspberries in early 2019 and I have been expanding a bit after that. I have had this setup running previously, so I am starting with some assumptions. These are not set in stone, but are supposed to limit my options to avoid wasting my time on trying to do everything. Avoid SD cards like the plague Ignore Wifi Run read-only Have a golden image Trust DHCP Boot from NFS All of these opinions are based on annoying stuff happening. Read more

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