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Liam Aikin

Continuous GitOps: Using Renovate for Helm Version Management in ArgoCD

Continuous GitOps: Using Renovate for Helm Version Management in ArgoCD

Parts: 1. Getting images from ECR (Regcred) 2. Getting Helm chart from ECR (AWS CLI Cronjob) 3. Renovate checking for updates from ECR (Don't need to cover) 4. Example GitOps repo Notes: For the Argo Repo updater, note that we can do this with OIDC stuff if we

Simplifying Helm Releases: GitHub Actions and Renovate for Chart Updates

Simplifying Helm Releases: GitHub Actions and Renovate for Chart Updates

Introduction: This post is part 2 of a series outlining streamlining continuous delivery of microservices. You can read part 1 here: link In part 1, we streamlined the process of building and storing images for our microservices in ECR using GitHub Actions, in this part, we will focus on the

Streamlining Microservices: Building and Deploying Docker Images to a private ECR with GitHub Actions

Streamlining Microservices: Building and Deploying Docker Images to a private ECR with GitHub Actions

Introduction: This will be the first in a series of posts outlining a continuous delivery pipeline that takes code from a GitHub repo and ultimately deploys running pods into a Kubernetes cluster via ArgoCD, the full workflow of which is demonstrated above. For this blog post we will be focusing

USE and RED methods: A Worked Example

USE and RED methods: A Worked Example

Introduction Quite often when something goes wrong with a system, we only know that something is happening, we rarely immediately know what the issue or its cause is, we therefore need to use certain methods for identifying the issue. In this blog post, I will be going over a few

Ground Up Reliability - An Example

Ground Up Reliability - An Example

Introduction: I have recently been reading Alex Hidalgo's SLO book, and one quote that struck me, which I will paraphrase below is: In a perfect world, an SLO would be built from the ground up This implies that for us to build an SLO for our application, system

Monitoring Sydney Transport with GTFS, Prometheus, and Grafana

Monitoring Sydney Transport with GTFS, Prometheus, and Grafana

Introduction In this post, I will outline the process of building a GTFS-Realtime Prometheus exporter for monitoring and visualising the Sydney transit system with Grafana. Additionally, I will provide details about working with the GTFS API alongside Prometheus and Grafana. Check out the live Grafana dashboard here: link Overview Building

Introducing the Apache Pinot Terraform Provider

Introduction: As technology evolves, so does the need for efficient, reliable and consistent infrastructure. In this post, I will be introducing the Apache Pinot Terraform provider - a powerful tool for streamlining the process of managing your Apache Pinot cluster configuration. Over the past few months, I've had

Automating PostgreSQL Clusters: A Guide to Deployment with ArgoCD and CloudNativePG

Automating PostgreSQL Clusters: A Guide to Deployment with ArgoCD and CloudNativePG

Use case: To be able to deploy and manage PostgreSQL clusters with GitOps and to provide an auditable and easily understandable system for developers to manage their own Postgres clusters from the same git repo. Brief description of the tech involved: GitOps with ArgoCD: GitOps is a software and deployment

Monitoring Modbus via Prometheus and Grafana

Monitoring Modbus via Prometheus and Grafana

Overview: In this blog post, I will be outlining the decisions and challenges faced during the process of bringing modern observability practices to the problem of monitoring the status of remote radio sites. Objectives: The following are the objectives and expected outcomes of doing so: * A robust and highly available

Going Mobile: Part 5

Going Mobile: Part 5

In this final post of the Going Mobile series, I'll go over some issues I have faced while deploying the system, and provide a summary of the solutions I chose to resolve them. Networking (again): svclb timing out: Upon deploying the nodes in different locations I realised that

Going Mobile: Part 4

Going Mobile: Part 4

3 Parts: This post will be split into 3 parts: * Networking * Monitoring * Chaos Engineering Networking: The networking stack is comprised of 3 main parts: * MagicDNS with Headscale * HAProxy * Traefik MagicDNS with Headscale The Headscale server handles the DNS resolution with MagicDNS, an example of how this is implemented in the

Going Mobile: Part 3

Going Mobile: Part 3

A change of plans: The original design in part 2 had a few missing parts: * It didn't include the hosting of the Headscale server required for our Tailscale overlay network. * The assumption of being able to have 2 physical location wasn't correct in the context of

Going Mobile: Part 2

Going Mobile: Part 2

The Plan: The part that matters Part 1: Identifying System Requirements Based on the outlines from Part 1, the requirements for our system are as follows: 1. Highly available, geographically distributed system 2. Distributed replicated storage 3. Ability to run argoCD, code-server, hakatime, and Nextcloud together, at a minimum Part

Going Mobile: Part 1

Going Mobile: Part 1

Introduction "Going Mobile" is a blog series that documents my journey to create a fully distributed system for both personal and professional use, which will allow me to work remotely from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. The project is primarily focused on creating a distributed

How I host my homelab with GitOps

How I host my homelab with GitOps

Background Sometime in August 2022, I came across this post on reddit by Khue Doan, and was so inspired that I decided that I would overhaul my old server and replace it with my own Kubernetes cluster. The Hardware * 3x HP ProDesk 600 G3 DM Mini i5-7500T with 16gb RAM

Zigbee Alarm System using Gotify push notifications written in Go

Zigbee Alarm System using Gotify push notifications written in Go

I wanted to create a system that would use a Zigbee door sensor to send a notification to my phone when the door was opened. I settled on creating a Zigbee gateway using a Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and a RaspBee 2 by Phoscon, which is a Zigbee module for