I suddenly realized that I haven’t blogged about Kubernetes for quite a while. But there’s so much happening in that area! For instance, even though creating Kubernetes objects from YAML configuration was the true way, it never felt that much convenient. So here’s the solution – use helm, the package manager for Kubernetes. Continue reading “Quick intro to helm – a package manager for Kubernetes”
The mystery of package downgrade issue
In last six or so weeks Microsoft managed to release whole bunch of .NET Core 2.1 SDKs (Preview 2, Release Candidate 1, Early Access, RTM) and we tried all of them. By the end of these weeks my cluster of CI servers looked like a zoo. As everything was done in a hurry, there were servers with RC1 pretending to be Early Access ones. EA servers pretended to be RTM compatible, and the only RTM host we had was pretending to support everything. Don’t look at me funny. It happens.
The problem happened when I tried to cleanup the mess: removed P2, RC1 and EA SDK tags from release branches, deleted prerelease servers, forced remaining servers to tell exactly who they are and finally rolled out new VMs with latest and greatest .NET Core SDK 2.1 installed. Naturally, very first build failed.
Service mesh implemented via iptables
So last time I mentioned, that another Kubernetes compatible service mesh – Conduit – has chosen another approach to solve the problem. Instead of enabling the mesh at machine level via e.g. http_proxy env variable, it connects k8s pods or deployments to it one by one. I really like such kinds of ideas that make 180° turn on solving the problem, so naturally I wanted to see how exactly they did that. Continue reading “Service mesh implemented via iptables”
Playing with a service mesh
I was looking for something new to play with the other day and somehow ended up with the thing called a service mesh. Pretty interesting concept, I can tell you. Not a game changing, or world peace bringing, but still nice intellectual concept with several scenarios where it can make life much simpler. Let’s have a look. Continue reading “Playing with a service mesh”
Debugging .NET Core app from a command line on Linux
Million years ago, way before the ice age, I was preparing small C++ project for “Unix Programming” university course and at some point had to debug it via command line. That was mind blowing. And surprisingly productive. Apparently, when nothing stands in the way, especially UI, debugging can become incredibly focused.
Since .NET Framework got his cross platform twin brother .NET Core, I was looking forward to repeat the trick and debug .NET Core app on Ubuntu via command line. Few days ago it finally happened and even though it wasn’t a smooth ride, that was quite an interesting experience. So, let’s have look.
Continue reading “Debugging .NET Core app from a command line on Linux”
Sending proactive messages with Microsoft Bot Framework
I was thinking again about that bot, who supposedly will monitor unreliable tests for me, and suddenly realized one thing. All examples I dealt with were dialog based. You know, user sends the first message, bot responds, etc. But the bot I’m thinking about is different. Initial conversation indeed starts like a dialog. But once bot starts monitoring unit test statistics and finds something that I should take a look at, he needs to talk first! Microsoft calls such scenario sending proactive messages and there’re few tricks how to make that possible. Continue reading “Sending proactive messages with Microsoft Bot Framework”
Playing with Microsoft Bot Framework
Part of my job description is our CI/CD and it kind of implies that I’m interested in keeping the build green. It doesn’t mean that I immediately jump in whenever some unit test fails, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on unreliable ones.
Whenever master branch stays red long enough, this is what starts to happen to each failed test in it:
- Look for test failures history in Google BigQuery (
select Name, Result, count(*)...). - If test behaves like a random results generator, create a case for that.
- Skip the test in master branch and put the case number as a reason.
- Find out who created the test (
git blame) and assign it back to the author.
Pretty simple. And boring. I can automate that, but it’s not always clear who is the author of the test. After all, people resign, update each other’s tests, refactor and destroy git history on special occasions. I was thinking about doing something with machine learning to solve that, but it feels like an overkill. Creating a bot, on the other hand, who would ask me to double check when it’s uncertain, sounds more interesting and actually doable. Even if I’m never going to finish it.
However, I’ve never wrote any bots before, so for starters I’d like to check what it actually feels like. Continue reading “Playing with Microsoft Bot Framework”
Caveman’s brief look into modern front-end
Well, it might seem surprising, given what this blog is usually about, but during most of my career my main focus was… in front-end development. Yup, JavaScript and friends. It wasn’t the only thing I did, but definitely the biggest one. After moving to Canada focus shifted a little bit: I still do occasional front-end tasks for our web project, which started back in 2009, but basically last 2 years I’m on a server side. Continue reading “Caveman’s brief look into modern front-end”
Web application firewalls
Our company is obsessed with IT security, so even though that’s not really my area, every other week I hear something new about the subject, whether I like it or not. However, sometimes interesting thing happen, when I learn about something I’ve been using for years, but only now realized that it actually has a name. I’m talking about Web Application Firewalls. Continue reading “Web application firewalls”
Quick intro to etcd
It feels like last months I focused way too much on debugging and .NET Core and stopped paying attention to topic I enjoyed to blog about over the last year – DevOps and distributed applications. That doesn’t feel right and in order to fix that I’ll play with something new today. For instance, with etcd.
During my romance with distributed apps, etcd always was somewhere near. It came up as alternative to Consul when I was experimenting with service discovery and configuration management. At some point etcd also comes up as a storage where Kubernetes stores its cluster data. Etcd is everywhere! So I think it worth understanding what that is and how it looks like.