Fabian Lee : Software Engineer

If you are getting the following error when invoking an Ansible playbook or any of the Ansible related utilities: ERROR!

HashiCorp Vault is a secret and encryption management system that allows your organization to secure sensitive information such as API keys, certificates, and passwords.

Getting the sum of a list of numbers is a common scenario on the command line, whether you are checking local filesystem utilization or parsing infrastructure reports for total cpu counts.

HashiCorp Vault is a secret and encryption management system that allows your organization to secure sensitive information such as API keys, certificates, and passwords.

HashiCorp Vault is a secret and encryption management system that allows your organization to secure sensitive information such as API keys, certificates, and passwords.

If ssh private/public keypair authentication is failing, check the logs on the server side for permission errors.

GitLab Agent for Kubernetes is an integration for the GitLab CI/CD pipeline that provides kubectl access from pipeline jobs, allowing Continuous Deployment into a live Kubernetes Cluster.

GitLab pipelines are frequently used for the building of binaries and publishing of images to container registries, but do not always follow through with Continuous Deployment to a live environment.

The globally shared set of GitLab runners for CI/CD jobs works well for building binaries, publishing images, and reaching out to publicly available endpoints for services and infrastructure building.

If you receive an error similar to below when calling the GCP API using ADC login credentials with either gcloud or terraform: Cannot add the project "myproj-i1wsbbn8pkfeq3jhkcg0z4" to ADC as the quota project because the account in ADC does not have the…

If you have a previous investment in Ansible Configuration Management for command line automation, you may now want to invoke that same logic from a GitLab CI/CD pipeline.

The first action you typically take after “git clone” is to change into the newly created directory.

When a GitLab CI/CD pipeline needs to persist job output or a rendered report, it will typically save it as an artifact on the job, or perhaps write it to an external storage service or as a GitLab Release archive.

When parsing a string that is divided by a separator char, getting the first N values OR last N values is a common scenario when dealing with: IP address separated by periods, e.g. “10.11.12.13” File path separated by forward slash “/tmp/myfolder/subpath1…

The Gitlab documentation shows how to use a ‘dotenv’ artifact to pass values from one job to another in a CI/CD pipeline.

GitLab CI/CD pipelines can be used to automatically build and push Docker images to the GitLab Container Registry.

If you are within the context of a CI/CD tool, you may run into the scenario where a newly applied git tag has initiated a pipeline action.

In a previous article, I described how to expose a Github source repo as a public Helm repository by enabling Github Pages and running the chart-releaser utility.

The only requirement for a public Helm chart repository is that it exposes a URL named “index.yaml”.

Github Actions provide the ability to define a build workflow based on Github repository events.

Docker can build multi-platform images that use a manifest index (fat manifest list) by using the Docker buildx command with backing containerd runtime and QEMU for cross-platform emulation.

If you want to use Docker to build cross-platform images, the first step is to enable QEMU to run images targeted at others architectures via emulation.

Docker is a container platform that streamlines software delivery and provides isolation, scalability, and efficiency with less overhead than OS level virtualization.

If you are administering a Kubernetes cluster that you have inherited or perhaps not visited in a while, then you may need to reacquaint yourself with: which Helm charts are installed into what namespaces, if there are chart updates available, and then wh…

The need to configure a specific pod’s container arguments is a common Kubernetes administration task.

HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) allow you to dynamically scale the replica count of your Deployment based on basic CPU/memory resource metrics from the metrics-server.

HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) allow you to dynamically scale the replica count of your Deployment based on criteria such as memory or CPU utilization, which make it great way to manage spikes in utilization while still keeping your cluster size and infras…

K3s is deployed by default with a metrics-server, but if you have a multi-node cluster it will fail unless you add the names of all the nodes to the kube-apiserver certificate.

Although jwt.io has become a common online destination for decoding JWT, this can also be done locally using jq. # populate JWT variable JWT=... # decode with jq utility echo $JWT | jq -R 'split(".") | .[0],.[1] | @base64d | fromjson' Attribution of credit

If you have just removed a module declaration from your Terraform configuration and now get a ‘Provider configuration not present’ error when running apply: Error: Provider configuration not present To work with module.mymodule_legacysyntax.null_resource.…

If you are getting the following error when invoking ‘ansible’, ‘ansible-playbook’, ‘ansible-galaxy’ or any of the Ansible related utilities: ERROR: Ansible could not initialize the preferred locale: unsupported locale setting This means Ansible cannot fi…

Deployments and Daemonset typically have more than one replica or desired replica count, and although kubectl default formatting will return columns summarizing how many are desired and how many are currently ready, an automated script needs to parse these

It would be uncommon to have one monolithic Terraform configuration for all the infrastructure in your organization.

There are multiple options for creating a TLS secret using kustomize.

If you need to create a new git branch for your project, one that is completely fresh and with no previous history or commits, that can be done using the “orphan” flag of the switch command if you are using git 2.23+.

If you are attempting to run “terraform init” with a Google Cloud Storage backend and get the following error: Error: Failed to get existing workspaces: querying Cloud Storage failed: storage: bucket doesn't exist The first check should be that the Google…

A simple grep can help you recursively search for a substring in all the files of a directory.

The forked workflow is popularized by the Open Source community where your personal contributions are made by having your own personal fork of a repository and pushing a GitLab Merge Request to a central repository.

Anthos Service Mesh for GKE can be installed in the following modes: In-cluster ASM using the asmcli utility Managed ASM using the asmcli utility Managed ASM using the ‘gcloud container fleet’ command Managed ASM using the Terraform asm submodule If you n…

If you need to test for a file’s existence, content size, and whether it was recently modified, the ‘find‘ utility can provide this functionality in a single call.

If you need to determine at the CLI whether a GKE cluster is managed using Standard or Autopilot mode, this is available by using gcloud to describe the cluster. # identify cluster and location gcloud container clusters list cluster_name=<clusterName> loc…

As much as Terraform pushes to be the absolute system of record for resources it creates, often valid external processes are assisting in managing those same resources.

GCP build triggers can easily handle Continuous Deployment (CD) when the source code is homed in a Google Cloud Source repository.

Flask is a suitable web server during development, but if you are going to deploy in a production environment, a Python WSGI server such as Gunicorn should be used.

It is not uncommon when using kustomize to inherit a large set of resources or components.

At some point, there will be a system change significant enough that a maintenance window needs to be scheduled with customers.

The centralized system keyring for apt was deprecated starting in Ubuntu 21, and is being replaced with an explicit path to the local gpg key in the ‘signed-by’ attribute.

If you have a simple directory containing multiple template files that should be generated on a target host, the ‘with_fileglob‘ lookup plugin provides an easy way to render them.

Whether you are working on scaling, performance, or high-availability, it can be useful to see exactly which Kubernetes worker node that pods are being scheduled unto.

If you are managing GKE clusters using Anthos Config Management (ACM) and need to take advantage of newer features or enhancements in ConfigSync or PolicyController, upgrading these components can be done using the gcloud utility. # check current version…