Posts

This post is part of the Red Hat Platform series. If you want the full picture of what we’re building toward, start there. Here we’re focused on continuous deployment using OpenShift GitOps, which is Red Hat’s supported distribution of ArgoCD. GitOps This post is really about continuous deployments of our sample Brix Pizza application. In a previous post we build a CI/CD pipeline that built our container image automatically after we made changes to the source code and committed it to git. In this case we want to get our application deployed to our Kubernetes cluster. ...

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. ...

This post is part of the Red Hat Platform series. If you want the full picture of what we’re building toward, start there. In this post we’ll focus on OpenShift Dev Spaces. Dev Spaces I’d love to tell you that Dev Spaces is a fun new store where you try out the latest ergonomic gadgets. Standing desks with built-in treadmills, kneeling chairs, and expensive vertical mice that look like a clay sculpture would be just some of the things in these pop-up stores. Those of us tied to a desk for way too many hours a day could check out the latest in geek comfort. I hope a place like this exists somewhere, but that’s not what we’re talking about today. ...

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. ...

This is part of an ongoing series on OpenShift as a platform for containers, VMs, AI workloads, and developer tooling. In this post we’ll set up a CI pipeline using OpenShift Pipelines to automatically build and push a container image for the Brix Pizza demo app whenever code is pushed to GitHub. If the application is going to run on OpenShift, it makes sense to build and test it there too. Your CI environment and your production environment become the same platform, which means fewer surprises at deployment time. ...

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. ...