Managing software updates for my Cdk8s home lab with Renovatebot

In my home lab, I use cdk8s which builds on AWS CDK to define my Kubernetes resources infrastructure as code. A lot of people use Helm which uses YAML programming, which I wrote about why I didn’t like, but cdk8s allows me to write it in TypeScript. I can write reusable classes to reduce duplication, like an Ingress construct that handles all the configuration I need. If you want to read more about the pros and cons of Cdk8s, read the post.

In this post, I’m going to show how I use an open-source system, Renovatebot, to keep my home lab up to date.

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Serverless isn't great at queue management

This is a continuation of my previous post where I talked about the challenges of using serverless/Function as a Service (FaaS) compute systems for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs. It sat in my drafts folder for a long time, so I just decided to publish it as is.

I used to work at AWS, and predictably we used a lot of AWS cloud services. In many cases, when an engineer looks for a service platform, they’ll often go directly to AWS Lambda because “it’s Serverless” with the justification that it’s simple and alternatives are too complex and not worth considering.

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Creating Kyverno policies using LLMs in Open WebUI

Kyverno is a handy policy engine for Kubernetes. For example, I use them to improve security by enabling user namespaces, or fix compatibility issues. I frequently use to validate or mutate resources that are created.

However, the YAML format can be a bit tricky for some of my more complicated policies. LLMs do alright creating many policies, but can struggle with my more complicated policies because they have to one-shot the policy and create it in one pass with no feedback or validation.

In this post, I’m going to show how I configure OpenWebUI to help me draft Kyverno policies.

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