On Thursday November 10th I was fortunate to be able to join the “Kubernetes at Optimal Value” event hosted by our dear friends at Fullstaq. The venue for this fully staq’ed day with Kubernetes ins-and-outs was Landgoed De Horst in Driebergen-Rijsenburg, which is as gorgeous as the name, but definitely a challenge to reach on the busy Dutch Thursdays. The travel was well worth it though: all of us, from techies to big decision makers, were heartily welcomed at the location and the overall vibe was excellent.

These last few months I’ve been writing a lot for Greater and today I can give away a tiny bit of the writing process. I’ve always been OK at writing documentation, but I certainly won’t go as far as saying that writing is a second nature. Writing a good piece of documentation and especially a blog post is hard. For a blog post, for me it takes a tremendous amount of time preparing, researching, testing, rewriting, proofreading, rewriting some more, etc. Coming up with only the idea for a new post can be, because of the gazillions of possibilities in the cloud native landscape, quite the challenge as well.

This is a fun one from a while ago. Let me warn you up front though: it goes against the principle to not login on your servers via SSH and use deployment tools like Ansible, but it has its use cases. So, what’s this all about?

We’ve covered quite a lot on our journey to automate the creation of one single VPS, hosting multiple websites or webapps. As you can see in the below diagram, we’re deploying to a Digital Ocean droplet, using Terraform and cloud-init. All code goes in git of course. Docker and Dockerfiles have been covered in part II of this series, Docker compose and a couple of web apps in part III.