(p)retired

I bought a friend an Atari VCS Wireless Joystick as a Christmas gift thinking (incorrectly) it would work with an Atari 2600+.

I have a new router that runs OpenWRT and it provides a Prometheus (Node) Exporter (written in Lua) NOTE The prometheus-node-exporter-lua Exporter package is a 4KB (!)

A simple deployment of cAdvisor to K3s and to confirm the ability to expose Ingresses using Tailscale Kubernetes Operator (TLS) and – since it’s already installed with K3s – Traefik (non-TLS). local image = "gcr.io/cadvisor/cadvisor:latest"; local labels…

I’m migrating from MicroK8s to K3s.

A Stack overflow question involving transcoding HTTP/JSON to gRPC, piqued my interest.

This one works!

The “W” signifies that the board includes wireless.

I’ve been working through Google’s Comprehensive Rust and, for the past couple of weeks, the Bare Metal Rust standalone course that uses the (excellent) micro:bit v2 that has a Nordic Semiconductor nRF52833 (an ARM Cortex-M4; interestingly its USB interfa…

Update 2025-07-08 Gemini CLI supports HTTP-based MCP server integration So, it’s possible to replace the .gemini/settings.json included in the original post with: { "theme": "Default", "mcpServers": { "ackal-mcp-server": { "httpUrl": "http:/…

Solved!

Former Microsoftie and Googler: Good documentation Extend your agent with Model Context Protocol Not such good documentation: Using agentic chat as a pair programmer Definition of “good” being, I was able to follow the clear instructions and it worked fir…

I couldn’t summarize this in a title (even with an LLM’s help): I wanted to: Run a Tailscale service discovery agent On a Tailscale node outside of the Kubernetes cluster Using Podman Quadlet Accessing it from the Kubernetes Cluster using the Tailscale’s…

I was unable to find a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementation for Prometheus.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is “all the rage” these days.

I’m building an emulator for Cloud Run.

I have built Prometheus Exporters for multiple cloud platforms to track resources deployed across clouds: Prometheus Exporter for Azure Prometheus Exporter for crt.sh Prometheus Exporter for Fly.io Prometheus Exporter for GoatCounter Prometheus Exporter f…

I’m a little obsessed with creating Prometheus Exporters: Prometheus Exporter for Azure Prometheus Exporter for crt.sh Prometheus Exporter for Fly.io Prometheus Exporter for GoatCounter Prometheus Exporter for Google Cloud Prometheus Exporter for Koyeb Pr…

Obsessing on gRPC Firestore Listen somewhat but it’s also a good learning opportunity for me to write stuff in Rust.

A question on Stack overflow Firestore gRPC Listen does not send deletions piqued by interest but created a second problem for me: I’m unable to get its Listen method to work using gRPCurl.

After recently discovering FauxRPC, I was sufficiently impressed that I decided to use it to test Ackal’s gRPC services using rust.

Read FauxRPC + Testcontainers on Hacker News and was intrigued.

Cloud Run supports gRPC startup|liveness probes which I’d not used before.

I build (and therefore) manage many container images.

A lazy Sunday afternoon and my interest was piqued by XML-RPC Client A very basic XML-RPC client wrapped in a Cloud Functions function: main.py: import functions_framework import os import xmlrpc.client endpoint = os.get_env("ENDPOINT") proxy = xmlrpc.…

For the first time, I chose Rust to solve a problem.

An interesting question on Stack overflow prompted me to understand how to use Visual Studio Code and Delve to remotely debug a Golang app running on Kubernetes (MicroK8s).

This is so useful that it’s worth its own post.

General You’ll need a Google Cloud project with Cloud Translation (translate.googleapis.com) enabled and a Service Account (and key) with suitable permissions in order to run the following.

I’ve written before about Ackal’s use of Firestore and subscribing to Firestore document CRUD events: Routing Firestore events to GKE with Eventarc Cloud Firestore Triggers in Golang using Firestore triggers I find Google’s Eventarc documentation to be co…

I naively (!)

Interested to explore Fly Kubernetes after being accepted into the closed beta.

I responded to a question Prometheus metric protocol buffer in gRPC on Stackoverflow and it piqued my curiosity and got me yak shaving.

Spent time today yak-shaving which resulted in an unplanned migration from MicroK8s ‘prometheus’ add-on to the new and not fully-documented ‘observability’ add-on: sudo microk8s.enable prometheus Infer repository core for addon prometheus DEPRECATION WAR…

I wrote about Navigating Koyeb’s Golang SDK.

This Stackoverflow question piqued my interest: retry policy configuration for grpc not working Service Config in gRPC is new to me but, my initial suspicion (albeit incorrect) was that the JSON types were incorrect.

Ackal deploys gRPC Health Checking clients in locations around the World in order to health check services that are representative of customer need.

The deployment of Kube State Metrics for Google Managed Prometheus creates both a PodMonitoring and ClusterPodMonitoring.

Referring to Accessing Google Services using gRPC, I wanted to query a project’s Cloud Logging for log-based metrics using gRPC.

CRD linting Returning to yesterday’s failing tests, it’s unclear how to introspect the E2E tests. kubectl get namespaces NAME STATUS AGE ... allns-s2os2u-0-90f56669 Active 22h allns-s2qhuw-0-6b33d5eb Active 4m23s kubectl g…

For ackalctld to be deployable to Kubernetes with Prometheus Operator, it is necessary to Enable ScrapeConfig to use (discovery|target) proxies #5966.

TL;DR Enable ScrapeConfig to use (discovery|target) proxies I’ve developed a companion, local daemon (called ackalctld) for Ackal that provides a functionally close version of the service.

Yet another cloud platform exporter for resource|cost management.

Responded to Get Custom K8s Resource using Python and found the CustomObjectsApi documentation unclear.

Thanks to Joe Mooring for his solution to my question as to how to do this.

Python’s Protocol Buffers code-generation using protoc has had significant changes that can cause developers… “challenges”.

Google announced Firestore … integration with Eventarc.

I’ve been running a DigitalOcean Apps static site for Hugo using the Hugo Buildpack.

I’ve been spending time recently optimizing Ackal’s use of Google Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring in posts: Filtering metrics w/ Google Managed Prometheus Kubernetes metrics, metrics everywhere Google Metric Diagnostics and Metric Data Ingested Yesterd…

I’ve been on an efficiency drive with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring.

I’ve written Prometheus Exporters for various cloud platforms.