This Blog is Running on Kubernetes
I've avidly followed the Kubernetes project since it was the basis of my undergraduate thesis in 2015. But despite all my reading and minikube experimentation, I felt I was missing out the important lessons you can only learn from using a technology to run real applications in production. I acutely felt this pain when contributing code to the Kubernetes ecosystem, as I was able to fix bugs, but didn't have knowledge and empathy around the production user's experience.
As of yesterday, I'm excited to that will no longer be the case.
Over the weekend, I launched a Kubernetes cluster in AWS using kops. Yesterday, I switched this blog from running on a dedicated host provisioned via Ansible to running on Kubernetes. Both my Kubernetes cluster and blog deployment violate best practices left and right, but they are serving traffic successfully!
I hope to write two introductory blog posts soon that examine how to use kops to create a Kubernetes cluster and how to deploy a simple static website onto Kubernetes. With those two introductory blog posts providing the foundation, we can really start having fun. On a notebook on my desk, I have a list of at least ten potential improvements for the current blog application. Sample ideas include encrypting traffic to this blog via cert-manager or setting up horizontal pod autoscaling. I also have ideas for improvements impacting the entire cluster, like setting up centralized logging using the ELK stack or putting a sensible RBAC in place. And we haven't even gotten into all the applications besides this blog that I want to run on k8s. Tbh, I'm at Winnie the Pooh with a pot of honey levels of excitement!
I hope to accompany these deployment and cluster improvements with both source code and deep-dive blog posts, so that anyone interested can have not only the what and how, but also the why. If there's anything specific that you'd like covered, please leave a comment :)