I am using Github Pages, for this blog, and for some workshops, tutorials, etc. Github Pages uses Jekyll to render the pages and there are instructions on how to setup Jekyll locally to test your content before publishing. I never managed to get them to work, I am not a Ruby expert and something was always missing.

While I was still working as a Developer Advocate at IBM, I have maintained a blog on Wordpress.com. Now that I retired, I don’t blog much. So I decided to let the Wordpress subscription expire by the end of this year, 2021. But I didn’t want to trash all I wrote so I started to play with Github Pages, Jekyll, and other tools. As you can see I have successfully moved my blog to Github Pages, now.

I wrote my first blog that involved Minikube in February 2019. And I still use Minikube a lot.

Recently I tried to figure out how to run Kubernetes exercises on a “memory challenged” notebook (8 GB RAM). I looked into alternatives, namely K3s (a small foorprint Kubernetes distribution) and K3d which uses K3s and runs it on top of Docker and not in a VM. That sounded like a solution to the memory challenge. K3d runs Docker in Docker: a worker node is a Docker container running on your workstation’s Docker instance. The worker node itself runs its own Docker and on this Docker instance all the Kubernetes deployments are running. This is totally cool on Linux since it eliminates the need for virtualization completely since Docker runs native on Linux. On Mac and Windows you use the virtualization that is part of Docker Desktop. So you need virtualization but it is perfectly integrated in your host operating system.

IBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform that runs your containerized workloads, including web apps, micro-services, event-driven functions, or batch jobs. Code Engine even builds container images for you from your source code. Because these workloads are all hosted within the same Kubernetes infrastructure, all of them can seamlessly work together. The Code Engine experience is designed so that you can focus on writing code and not on the infrastructure that is needed to host it.

We have added an application security example to our pet project Cloud Native Starter.

I have written about Knative Installation, Knative Serving, and Knative Eventing. I have used the simple HelloWorld sample application which is perfectly fine to learn Knative. But I wanted to apply what I have learned with an example that is closer to reality. If you have followed my blog, you should know our pet project Cloud Native Starter. It contains sample code that demonstrates how to get started with cloud-native applications and microservice based architectures.