Last week I announced the launch of a new project I've been working on - Cloud Native Now - a new monthly newsletter that will provide a roundup of all the happenings in the cloud native world. This newsletter is my attempt at keeping myself, and others, up-to-date on all the latest news, tools and events happening in the cloud native world. A new issue will be published each month on the last Friday of that month and contain a roundup of articles, announcements, tools, tutorials, events and CFPs relating to cloud native technologies and the community.
As part of a side project I'm currently working on I needed to spin up a new Kubernetes cluster that I could manage via GitOps. I decided to take this opportunity to take a look at OpenTofu and see how it handles as it's been several years now since I last used Terraform. My plan was to use OpenTofu to scaffold a fairly basic Civo Kubernetes cluster and then use Flux to handle installing workloads into the cluster. It took me a little trial-and-error so I thought I'd write up my final setup to help others avoid the issues and to help my future self when I come to do this again in a couple years!
Recently, a friend of mine asked me what resources I'd recommend to start learning about Kubernetes. He was a victim of the layoffs that seem to be so prevalent right now and has experience as a classic SysOps / SysAdmin engineer but no expose to Kubernetes yet and wanted to learn to help improve his job-hunting prospects.
I wasn't sure what to recommend at first, it's been a long time since I was learning Kubernetes for the first time and wasn't sure what was still useful and relevant but what follows is what I ended up sharing with him, and now with all of you.
Last weekend I finally went to my first ever EMF Camp after wanting to go for 4+ years now. I had a thoroughly good time while I was there and wanted to share my experience to encourage others to go in the future.
I'm quite a fan of Renovate for automating my dependancy updates. I've been using it quite extensively - at Giant Swarm, with my personal infrastructure and with k8s.social - to keep things up-to-date in the various Kubernetes clusters I manage. This has been working great for container images and Helm charts, with both being managed via GitOps and Renovate automating the version updates via PRs, but I have now found myself wanting to automate the updating of the Kubernetes version for my Civo cluster. Renovate doesn't have built in support for this but we can make it work with the use of custom datasources!
