Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secret integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…
Introduction After the release of version 1.8.0, Packer entered a maintenance and upkeep mode where the primary objectives were major bugs, and new features and medium or lower bugs are triaged. Part of this goal re-alignment means that multiple new…
Introduction At the end of 2017 Kubernetes had won the container orchestration wars. Rival container orchestration platforms had transitioned to instead providing managed service offerings of Kubernetes. There were and are multiple powerful and enterprise offerings for this functionality. However,…
Introduction Packer is the industry standard tool for managing machine image artifacts. It is also essentially the “only game in town”. It supports a variety of platforms and provisioners for sophisticated management of various sources and builds using HCL2, and…
The typical workflow design pattern for server provisioning is to create instance image artifacts, and then provision infrastructure, and then provision software and configuration unique to the instance. There may also be a desire to independently update and modify the…
Introduction I can still recall with clarity from over a decade ago when one of my job responsibilities was ensuring the source control management, building, packaging, quality assurance, delivery, and release of an enormous monolithic software tool suite comprised of…
Introduction In August of 2005, Luke Kanies created Puppet because he was tired of remembering how the different package management systems worked, and wanted to unify them into a single interface. In February of 2012, Michael DeHaan created Ansible as…
Introduction Most people familiar with the Kubernetes scheduler algorithm are aware of the basic mathematical concepts around its logic. Anyone who has also pursued an interest in learning about it at a low level is aware of its relation to…
Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault is the industry standard for secrets management. In version 1.4 of Vault, the integrated storage backend supplied by Raft was promoted from beta to general availability. This Raft integrated storage backend has replaced Consul as the default…
Introduction Recently I was asked once again to build out Kubernetes cluster infrastructure, and deploy and configure supporting software, and then migrate a client’s QA environment and applications to the cluster. This was all to be completed in a week…