I’ve had enough of Helm. I don’t know who thought string-based templating engines would be a good idea, but I have had one too many indention relate bugs. They’re a source of bug and a pain. Kubernetes YAML files just contain a ton of boiler-plate YAML configuration. Like how many times do I have to specify the labels? Its spec/template/spec for Deployment, but spec/jobTemplate/spec for CronJob. Ain’t nobody got time to remember that.

Enter cdk8s. It’s built-upon CDK, a software development kit that uses standard programming languages, like TypeScript, Python, or Java, as a way to define resources that then get compiled into YAML or JSON to upload to CloudFormation, or in our case, Kubernetes.

Why would you want/need a full programming language just to define some infrastructure? Well, there are some benefits. Let’s go through them.

This blog is a static website compiled using Hugo. Up to this point, I built the website and packaged all of the assets into a Docker container with NGINX which was hosted on my dedicated server cluster.

This worked well and was simple, but I have an upcoming project that I’ll be announcing soon that required dynamic content that nginx + pure static files wasn’t easily able to implement with NGINX.

To fix this, I decided to migrate this blog from NGINX to ASP.NET Core. Here’s how and why.

I posted a link to my blog on Slack and was greeted with HTML entities right in the website summary. I could see certain characters like the apostrophe ’ being encoded as ’.

Here’s how I fixed this problem.

I’ve been running my own mail server for well over ten years now. It’s pretty old, so it’s hard to make changes to it, but it’s running in Kubernetes. I was using a mixture of Postfix, OpenDKIM, OpenDMARC, and Amavis for spam filtering with SpamAssasin, but it wasn’t very good at catching spam. Instead, its time move to rspamd. It’s much newer and encapsulates DKIM, DMARC, DNS based blacklisting, bayesian filtering, etc. all in one single tool.

Here’s my notes on migrating, what it took to get it going and some tweaks I made.

This Christmas season, I decided I wanted to play with programmable light strings and see if I could create an interesting light show on the front of my house. I stumbled across xlights, an open source light show sequencing program and got to work.