Introduction Part of observability is logging. Logging is heavily used to debug and understand what is happening in systems. The end goal is to have logging to Elasticsearch that is running in the cluster with fluent-bit to a fluentd. Fluent-bit Fluent-bit is going to be used to grab the logs from pods, check if they are json, if so parse them, and then forward them to fluentd. The reason for using both fluent-bit and fluentd is that we can aggregate the logs in fluentd. Read more...

Installing fluentd helm chart Starting off installing the fluentd helm chart like all other helm charts. Get the values.yaml file and then slowly change the settings being careful to not break it before its even installed. After deploying the helm chart the single pod in the stateful set is crashing. Starting off looking at the logs for the pod there aren’t any for the container fluentd. It makes it quite a bit harder when its crashing but you don’t know if it is crashing because of the config or a setting you made in the values. Read more...

What is ArgoCD ArgoCD is an application that syncs what is in a git repo into kubernetes. This is also known as GitOps. The idea is that ArgoCD will know what is in the git repo compared to what is currently in the cluster. This differs from say a CI/CD pipeline that just runs kubectl apply -f ./manifests in that after the apply you no longer know what the state of the cluster is. Read more...

Terraform is a great tool for infrastructure as code (IaC). I for one do not like pointing and clicking to configure things. With Terraform I no longer need to point and click unless it is to reference something. What I mean by this is that I can visit the Azure portal (I mainly work in Azure for my day job) look at the settings for a specific thing such as a virtual machine (VM). Read more...