According To Ali

I wanted to build a Homelab for some time but it was taking a backseat as I always had access to cloud environments (eg: cloud accounts, VMware DC etc) and the use cases I was focusing on didn't really warrant for one. But lately, some new developments and opportunities in the industry triggered the need to explore use cases in a bare-metal server environment, ultimately leading to the built of my own homelab, called MetalSNO. In this post, I will discuss some of my key reasons for building a homelab, the goals I set for it, and the process I followed to building one from scratch. I'll conclude with some reflections on whether it was truly worth it and what I plan to do with it going forward. Compelling reasons (The Why ) My uses cases for a homelab weren't about hosting plex server, home automation etc (I have them on Raspberry PIs for some years now). My Homelab is really about exploring technologies and concepts that are on par with industry trend. Below are some of the ...

So, I finally got the little green tick of having CKA certification in my certification list. I put off this exam for so long that it seriously became not funny anymore. The internet has quite literally way more than 1000 posts on this topic. But what harm would one more post cause? So here's mine. I will write it from my perspective. I am writing this post just in case if anyone benefits from it, as I predict there could be many on the same boat as me. Background: Kubernetes, modern application architecture, DevSecOps etc are not new territory for me. In fact, I think I am fairly versed in K8s and related tech stack. But due my own imposter syndrome I have been putting off sitting the CKA exam. However, last week I thought about the CKA as "just another approval for my skills" and got the nudge to sit the exam.  Here's what I did till the day I sat for the exam. (Everybody is different but the below worked for me the best) The preparation: As I have been working with...

I wrote about the key concepts about service mesh and how to evaluate the requirements for a service mesh in my previous post here:  Deciphering the hype of Service Mesh . This post is a follow up from there covering the technical aspects. Part 1:   Deciphering the hype of Service Mesh Part 2:   Understanding The Ingress and The Mesh components of Service Mesh. Part 3: Uderstanding the observability component of Service Mesh (TBD in another post).  Almost all popular service mesh technologies/tools (eg: Istio, LinkerD) have both ingress and mesh capabilities. Conceptually, I see them as 2 mutually exclusive domain (integrated nicely by the underlying tool). Understanding  the ingress  and  the mesh  components individually, such as what they offer, what I can do with them etc, was the basic building block to my understanding of service mesh technology as a whole. This is arguably the most mis-represented topic in the internet. So, I thought,...