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Ever since I first dipped my toes into the Kubernetes waters, there were people arguing against Kubernetes along the lines of “you can run your stuff on a single EC2 instance much cheaper and simpler”. Here I want to lay out why I believe this is a short-sighted and incomprehensive perspective. Hear me out! 😉 Most people think of Kubernetes as a mere container orchestrator, a component so deep down in your application’s operational stack that developers don’t have to think about it as the target platform for the applications they build....

There’s so many rants out there about Kubernetes and container environments in general and the most recent statements by Kelsey Hightower just fueled these so I want to share why I believe Kubernetes and the cloud-native way to run apps these days is a good thing. Back in the days when I wanted to run a server application and expose it to the Internet I rented a root server (or used one I already had), copied all the artifacts onto it using scp and started the app/web server in the background, using screen or maybe a systemd service....

Discuss this post As most of you might know Germany has been hit pretty hard by Russia’s war on Ukraine and the subsequent lack of natural gas supply out of Russia. A consequence of that development is that gas prices have been raised for all customers in Germany (i.e. nearly 20 million homes) by around a factor of 3. The German government has set a goal for the nation to save 20% of the gas compared to last year’s usage to prevent an emergency situation in terms of a lack of gas....

Discuss this post This is the story of a seemingly simple task of creating a GitHub Actions workflow that … escalated quickly. I hope you people can learn from my mistakes and do better (or quicker). You’ll find the tl;dr version here. Over at Weaveworks we try to automate as many engineering processes as possible. That’s especially true for the tedious work of releasing a new version of one of the components we build....

Discuss this post EDIT January 11, 2022: In previous versions of this article I advertised the try_files directive which made the solution vulnerable to path traversal attacks. Using the return directive and sending a 301 redirect fixed this. Thanks to Penple for making me aware of this vulnerability. With Mastodon being all the rage right now and people massively moving over, new opportunities arise. One of these is that Mastodon allows you to take ownership of your identity using the WebFinger protocol....