I occasionally write blog posts where I talk about software, hardware, or even plants that I'm working on.
Recent Posts
Comparing changes in a Nix Flake
Nix/NixOS is a declarative language for defining your entire operating system. I use it on my dedicated servers to be able to apply GitOps for the servers. I define my services in a Git repo, everything from what version of packages to use, to what services should be installed, and how they should be installed. Those servers run Kubernetes which is where most of my services live.
Nix is a beast. The language is quite complicated and I wrote about my challenges. While I’ve gotten used to the language, I still don’t consider it intuitive. With that out of the way, my next challenge is that if I run nix flake update, which updates the packages that come from NixPkgs (which is most packages that you install.) Then I don’t really know what’s changing.
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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...