Create Kubernetes service accounts with Terraform

Sometimes you’ll have to grant other people (or entities) access to your Kubernetes cluster. Easiest is you can give them your admin credentials, but this is similar to giving your house key to a friend, when they only need access to your living room. You can give them different keys, depending on access level required. Those could be readonly access to view services status, or deploy service account that can create/update services....

August 1, 2023 · 3 min · Karn Wong

Hassle-free Kubernetes monitoring with Coroot

Successfully deploying services are not the end, maintenance is coming to town! When you want to see how your system works, usually people rely on SaaS like Datadog or New Relic to do the heavy lifting. Also a lot of $$$ is required. Also with SaaS like these, usually you have to config your application to forward metrics/logs to your monitoring provider, this could mean a few months of engineering man-days....

June 9, 2023 · 2 min · Karn Wong

Kubernetes with Grafana Cloud

Kubernetes is awesome, I think this is obvious if you have more than a handful of services to manage. If you use cloud, either VM or container-based runtime, it would provide you a dashboard to see the metrics. But what about kubernetes? Since you would have multiple services inside a single cluster, in which it’s backed by VMs, at best you would only see into your VMs’ metrics, but doesn’t provide separate metrics per each service....

April 1, 2023 · 2 min · Karn Wong

Cost optimization with kubernetes

Correction 2023-07-02: fix homelab specs and corresponding AWS EC2 instance class (it’s actually 32GB RAM, not 64GB) Congratulations, you managed to successfully deployed a few services on kubernetes! But this is not the end 👀. Unfortunately money doesn’t grow on trees, and if you can’t justify your infra expenses, finance department won’t be happy. If you’re using Terraform, you can use Infracost to create a cost report. Pretty nifty. But what about kubernetes?...

April 1, 2023 · 2 min · Karn Wong