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This post is part of a series on OpenShift as a platform. We’re looking at the container foundation here, specifically what OpenShift adds on top of upstream Kubernetes and how Operators turn that into an extensible platform for everything else we’ll cover. Kubernetes is the Engine Kubernetes is the most widely adopted container orchestration system in the world, and OpenShift is built on top of it. But “built on top of” understates what Red Hat has done. Kubernetes is a powerful set of primitives such as a control plane, an API, a scheduler. This is the engine for managing containers on a distributed cluster. But just like your car, the engine while being maybe the most important component, won’t get you to the grocery store alone. You still need tires, a steering wheel, brakes, and a series of other things for your car to be a useful tool. Well, organizations need more than the basic Kubernetes components to run their workloads. This includes things like authentication, observability, security controls, and a console for it to be used for production. ...

I’ve always had this feeling that if we really knew how to do IT “the right way” we wouldn’t have all these different tools and methods. Gitops vs deployment pipelines, declartive vs imperative commands, immutable containers vs mutable virtual machines. Of course over my career I’ve seen that no one method or tool is right for every situation. But I’ve always felt drawn to the utopian idea that there was a single platform everyone used and fit their needs. ...

We’ve now reached the era where our jobs might be replaced by artificial intelligence. None of us are really immune to the impacts that AI will have on our jobs but I wasn’t expecting it to hit my household quite so soon. No, it wasn’t my tech job that was replaced … yet. It wasn’t even my wife’s job, but instead it was my dog Charlie’s career that was impacted. ...

Over the past several years, I worked in marketing and spent a lot of time trying to make technical demos more compelling. The goal was always to demonstrate a capability or product feature, but there’s no reason a demo can’t also be fun, memorable, and grounded in reality. “Hello World” gets the job done, but it doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t resemble how applications are actually built, deployed, or operated. And because of that, it’s easy to forget. ...

Today marks the beginning of the 2024 Formula 1 season, a notable day for my mental well-being as it begins the end of a long, cold winter. The winter months often challenge me, limiting my time outdoors and casting shadows over my daily routines. The start of the Formula 1 season provides a needed distraction and spark of excitement as I look forward to warmer weather. My interest in Formula 1 was ignited by the popular Netflix series, " Drive to Survive." Although new to the sport, I quickly became engrossed, but I initially found myself without a team to support. Over time, the Mercedes Formula 1 team stood out, embodying values I’ve always respected. ...

Maybe it’s bougie, but one of the reasons I purchased E200-8d Supermicro Servers for my home lab was because they had IPMI built into them. Being able to remote into my lab at night when I’m messing around with different configurations was a nice to have. When I was consulting and traveling a lot, being able to remotely start my servers up was really important. I tested out things many times in my lab so that customers wouldn’t have to spend time figuring it out themselves. Anyway, the point is I bought servers with IPMI in them because I thought it was important. ...

Virtual infrastructure has a lot of advantages, but one of the biggest time savers is being able to provision new virtual machines quickly from a template. As part of this series we’ve covered, how to deploy harvester, how to setup a new virtual network , how to create a new virtual machine, and how to backup and restore VMs. In this post we’ll take a look at how we can create templates and deploy harvester VMs from templates. ...

In our previous posts we setup a Harvester cluster in our lab, configured the network, and deployed our first VM. Here we will explore the backup and restore options available to us from the Harvester console. If you’re new to running virtual machines on Kubernetes, you’re probably questioning a few things, like will your current VM backup tool work? The answer is maybe, but only if it is able to backup a container since our VMs are now wrapped inside of a Kubernetes Pod thanks to Kubevirt. There are several options out there (I work for one of those companies myself) but this post only focuses on whats built into the Harvester solution. ...

I have a very soft spot in my heart for VMware. Pretty early on in my career when I was a System Administrator I got the opportunity to convert my companies physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure on VMware vSphere. The version of VMware we moved to, is not relevant to this discussion other than to show how truly old I am, and in order to save the parties involved some embarrassment we’ll ignore this implementation detail. ...

During the previous posts in this series, we deployed a Harvester cluster, setup virtual networks to segment traffic, and deployed our first virtual machine. So far this has been a pretty good experience, but most of my day job requires me to do a lot of work on containers so I’d like to have Kubernetes clusters at home. Of course I could deploy a bunch of VMs for a new Kubernetes cluster, but Harvester is built on top of Kubernetes already. So this post will show us how we can connect Rancher to our Harvester cluster so we can use the underlying Kubernetes cluster that Harvester runs on to run our own containers. ...