Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash I’ve been running a short-term experiment across the GKE Compute options within my “Home Lab” (read: GCP-hosted Google Kubernetes Engine) with a view to optimise for a balance between ease of operation and cost efficiency. If that sounds useful to you, then by all means read on! Let’s dive right in with the Billing data. The chart below shows the view of costs over the course of my two-month experiment for this small GKE Cluster.| alexos.dev
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash In this blog post I’ll take you through how I set up the web analytics software Plausible on my own Kubernetes cluster. Whilst Plausible do publish guidance on how to do this, I found that it needed a few tweaks and I wanted to make a few enhancements to get it working reliably enough for my needs. A Brief Sidebar: What is Plausible?| alexos.dev
Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash In this blog post I’m going to talk through my recent experiences as I attempted to ditch Docker Desktop - the licensing changes that come into effect at the end of January being the primary motivator. Without going into any detail about it, let’s just say I’m not a fan of taking something that you’ve made freely available previously and deciding that you now want to charge for it!| alexos.dev
Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash When things go wrong - and yes, they will go wrong - it’s extremely helpful to have easy access to a set of runbooks to guide the unfortunate engineer through the steps needed to mitigate the problem as swiftly as possible. In this post I’m going to describe the approach we use for this where I work, which we’ve found to work very well.| alexos.dev
I’ve just finished binging on a whole host of talks from KubeCon EU 2021, and thought I’d scribble down some of my immediate thoughts - from the talks I “went” to, as well as more generally about virtual conferencing these days. Which is a bit of a change of pace, let’s be honest. Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash I should caveat this post with the obvious - my experiences are heavily based around how I chose to take in the conference - the sessions I picked, the things I got inv...| alexos.dev
Photo by fabio on Unsplash In this post I’m going to discuss a couple of tools I’ve used to help visualise workloads deployed on my Kubernetes clusters. The tools I’ll be looking at are: Kube Ops View WeaveWorks Scope I’ll also finish by discussing some of the other approaches I am yet to try fully, but which might be better alternatives for larger clusters.| alexos.dev
Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash In this post I’m going to talk through the approach I use to switch between multiple Google Kubernetes Engine clusters on the command line. I’d expect a lot of the stuff in here has some benefit for non-GCP Kubernetes clusters too, but the ones I use on a day-to-day basis are all hosted there. Key outcomes for me were: To be able to switch from one cluster to another with only a small number of commands, even if I have to authenticate with different user ...| alexos.dev
It’s probably natural to get a bit contemplative as one year rolls into another. In this post I’m going to spend a little time writing about some of the things I’ve learnt after a year moving into a “Senior Engineer” position, and then onto some of the things I hope to change going forwards, based on what I’ve learnt. As a result, this post is going to be a bit introspective and not very technical - hopefully it won’t come across as too self-indulgent!| alexos.dev
This blog post is about my team’s first ever Chaos Day - where we ran a series of experiments designed to test how our platform performed when we tried to disrupt it, or the workloads that run on it. This entry was originally posted on Medium under my employer’s publication. It was January 2020, and we had just gone through another Peak trading period - significant for a larger retailer.| alexos.dev
In this post, after a brief intro to what krew actually is, I run through a dozen or so plugins I’ve installed using it which I find to be pretty handy time-savers. Hope you find at least one of them useful! Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash So, long time no post. I was resolved to posting more frequently in 2020 … and we’re at the end of February … so not so successfully then!| alexos.dev
Photo by Davide Ragusa on Unsplash Spoiler Alert! This blog is really about Vertical Pod Autoscaling and patching of kube-system workloads in GKE. It just might not sound like it at the start 😄 If you’re not interested in how I got there and just want to jump to the good stuff - I’ve summarised it at the bottom of the post. So, this all started because I wanted to try out Elasticsearch.| alexos.dev
Barcelona night skyline - taken from Riot Games' website This blog post summarises my thoughts on a very entertaining and informative trip to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona, May 2019. It was my first trip there and I picked up a variety of useful bits ‘n’ pieces while I was there. Any Stand-out Themes? In trying to sum things up, I find myself struggling for any stand-out themes.| alexos.dev
Yes, this was a wall of donuts to celebrate Kubernetes 5th birthday! I’m going to use this blog post to talk about a couple of other things I learnt about while at KubeCon 2019. These don’t slow neatly into my other posts from my time at the conference, but I still felt they were interesting enough to call out separately. How Changing Kubernetes Itself Works I went to a couple of talks focusing on some proposals for improving Kubernetes itself.| alexos.dev
So, why service meshes? Because I am architect, and architects are born to love service meshes. Because actually I can totally see the value of a service mesh, I just can’t quite seem to convince anyone that they’re worth biting the bullet on yet. It’s a design pattern I’m totally sold on and just need to find the killer need for so we can start reaping some of those sweet, sweet benefits.| alexos.dev
One of the (many) topics I was keen to get into while at KubeCon was observability. This is something that is just so totally and utterly crucial when running this whole “distributed microservice” thing that you really need good solutions to this stuff to make a success of it. In the case of my team right now, we have some good stuff going on. Prometheus & Grafana are great - digging those a lot.| alexos.dev
Intro by the CNCF Director Dan Kohn’s talk starts with a screenshot of the game Civ VI - who doesn’t want to see a turn-based strategy game reference in a talk to nearly 8,000 IT professionals geeks - he is emphasising the idea that in the game you could not train Knights without first discovering Stirrups. Civ VI Tech Tree He builds on this with further “real” examples of two people independently discovering things - he uses the examples of Facebook (watch the film the Social Network...| alexos.dev
If you have any questions about any of this document, please contact me. General All content provided on this blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information.| alexos.dev
This blog entry was originally posted on Medium for my employer. This time last year, our newly-formed Platforms Team in John Lewis Online were putting the finishing touches to a brand new Kubernetes platform designed to run the frontend of johnlewis.com in Google Cloud. Twelve months later, we’ve passed through Black Friday without a hitch and built a raft of new capabilities along the way. What follows is a post reflecting on the journey so far — if that sounds interesting, then rea...| alexos.dev
Welcome to the page about me. If you’ve arrived here, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you are interested in at least one of the following things! Who am I? What is this website actually about anyway? Do any of the opinions on this site actually matter? If I read through all of this text, will I eventually know why the answer is 42? If you’re interested in a more “formal” answer as to who I am and what I do for a living, you might want to try here (or, everyone’s favourite fo...| alexos.dev
My blog about interesting technology - and in particular Cloud Platforms & Services, and my experiences with them| alexos.dev
My blog about interesting technology - and in particular Cloud Platforms & Services, and my experiences with them| alexos.dev