Pim Widdershoven

I'm a bit conservative about automating my home because of the vendor lock-in or the requirement to have a central hub. Last Black Friday I came across the Shelly products. Shelly doesn't require a central hub and only needs a Wi-Fi connection and there isn't a vendor lock-in because the modules do have their own web interface and API. Interesting and I bought a couple of Shelly 1's! In this article more about the Shelly 1 and how I use them to automate my front door and back door lights.

In this blog post, I'll explain how you deploy a brand new Kubernetes Cluster with Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE). Rancher Kubernetes Engine doesn't include the Rancher management application itself and will deploy a vanilla Kubernetes Cluster for you, the exact same thing as kubeadm can do for you but much more simple!

Keycloak is an open source Identity and Access Management solution aimed at modern applications and services. It makes it easy to secure applications and services with little to no code. I'm using Keycloak as an Identity Broker and have multiple Active Directories added to Keycloak.

Kubernetes Certificate Manager (cert-manager) is a native Kubernetes controller helping you to issue certificates from a variety of sources, such as Let's Encrypt, HashiCorp Valut, a signing keypair and self-signed. The Certificate Manager ensures certificates are valid and up-to-date, and attempt to renew certificates at a configured time before expiry.

At my work, we try to automate almost everything. We're using Docker to containerize our in-house developed software and are running these containers on CentOS 7 machines. When you're using a modern CentOS 7 version, the XFS filesystems are configured correctly with d_type support activated. But when you want to run Docker containers on an older version of CentOS 7, d_type support could be disabled causing a lot of trouble when you're chowning and chmoding files in a container: files are not found or skipped, etc.

Officially, GitLab doesn't support RBAC enabled Kubernetes clusters yet, but with some manual configuration, it is possible to integrate your Kubernetes cluster into Gitlab with RBAC enabled.

Caution: The configurations in this blog post adds cluster administrative access to your GitLab server. Unfortunately, GitLab 11 needs this access to query the cluster and install applications on it.