pipetail Blog

10 most common mistakes using terraform

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 07:00:00 +0100

We had the chance to see quite a bit of infrastructures in our years of experience with AWS, GCP and Azure and we see some mistakes being repeated. No shame in that, we’ve done most of these too!

I’ll try to show the ones we see very often and talk a bit about how to fix them.

BTW we did a blogpost about “10 most common mistakes using kubernetes”

Improve visibility in Helm workflows with Werf!

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 08:00:00 +0100

What’s the most annoying thing about Helm workflows? There’s literally no visibility during the deployment process. Do you have some migration (Helm) hook that’s failing? Helm will tell you that one of the hooks failed but all the kubectling is up to. And that’s just fine, Helm is too complex even without some live tailing of the deployment process. The current state This article did not come out from the blue.

How would I proceed with Kubernetes deployments?

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 10:00:00 +0100

Last time I’ve written a few words about the orchestration of Helm deployments. I’ve mentioned there that I’m not so big fan of Helm in terms of deployment of applications. That’s 100% true, but do I have any other alternatives?

Helmfile basics: get your Helm flow organized

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 10:00:00 +0100

There are no doubts that Helm is extremely popular tool, perhaps the most popular tool in the whole Kubernetes ecosystem. But are there any ways how to streamline deployments of complex applications?

10 most common mistakes using kubernetes

Mon, 04 May 2020 07:00:00 +0100

We had the chance to see quite a bit of clusters in our years of experience with kubernetes (both managed and unmanaged - on GCP, AWS and Azure), and we see some mistakes being repeated. No shame in that, we’ve done most of these too!

I’ll try to show the ones we see very often and talk a bit about how to fix them.

More EKS tips to make your life easier

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 07:00:00 +0100

We’ve spent most of the last month on implementing EKS. Surprisingly, we’re always solving the same concerns no matter what project we’re working on. Here’s couple of tips for your EKS clusters! Skip kube2iam, go directly with IAM Roles for Service Accounts Kube2iam is amazing tool. I really like it and it helped me with granular control access in couple of projects. However, there’s a better solution that is supported out of the box: IAM roles for services accounts.

Getting started with PodSecurityPolicy on EKS

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 07:00:00 +0100

As you might already know, security is not something that a specialized department should be responsible for. Instead, we all should bear in mind that security matters and build secure solutions from the very beginning. Today we’re gonna talk about some practices in the world of containerized apps and Kubernetess. So let’s say we have some best practices for the containerized workloads. But how to enforce that? We’ll tell you right away.

GitLab Runner on EKS

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 08:00:00 +0100

GitLab-CI/CD is a great and powerful product for CI/CD pipelines. Hosted gitlab.com solution offers shared runners and some usage minutes based on your paid plan (even if the free tier). Though you might want to run your own runner in your private or public cloud. I will show how to run GitLab runner on AWS using terraform, Elastic Kubernetes Service and GitLab kubernetes integration.

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager: bye bye bastion hosts!

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 07:00:00 +0100

There are customers where public internet access is no go. But at the same time you need to access your EC2 instances, right? How would you approach this? Usually, we use bastion hosts, that’s basically a different name for jump host you can use to access internal resources. In AWS, you don’t need to manage such extra instances and take care of all the low-level configuration. Instead, you can leverage fully managed Session Manager from the AWS Systems Manager suite!

Applications are not easy, tracing is: context propagation

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 19:00:00 +0100

A few weeks ago I’ve published my introduction to the tracing with OpenTelemetry instrumentation. I was trying to explain there that tracing has some value even in standalone applications. It was just a recommendation, but today we’re gonna talk about scenarios where tracing is a must: distributed systems.

More complicated EKS scenarios: EKS managed worker nodes without internet access

Wed, 12 Feb 2020 08:00:00 +0100

Are you using EKS managed worker pools? If you don’t have any specific reasons for not using them, you should. It saves tons of time plus it boosts the “managed Kubernetes” feeling. However, this pretty new offering did not cover one specific use case: cluster with no Internet access.

Applications are not easy, tracing is: a brief introduction to OpenTelemetry

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0100

I have great news! OpenTelemetry will be in beta soon! What does it mean? Well, we can start instrumenting applications directly with OpenTelemetry and we can skip its ancestors.

DAPR: introduction to Distributed Application Runtime

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:00:00 +0100

At the moment, there are no doubts that transformation to the new architectural pattern, microservices architecture, is happening. Today, I don’t want to emphasize that microservices architecture does not solve everything. This transformation is happening and my role here is to show you some possible ways how to minimize the struggle.