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Now that I have a Kubernetes cluster handy, I wanted to get my hands dirty by deploying my first application on it. What else is better than running an application I wrote myself to learn something to double up on the investment? If you want to read up on Short{Paste} , the application I wrote, you may read my blog post on it. App deployment I started by switching from Global to the Local cluster’s Default namespace/project. From the Workload tab, clicking on Deploy takes me to the deploy workload page. Here, I start by naming the workload as shortpaste and selecting the docker image adyanth/shortpaste. I leave the port mapping empty for now since I plan to add a layer 7 Ingress rather than a layer 4 NodePort or a Layer 4 load balancer. Under environment variables, I add what my app expects. Finally, for now, I let the scale default to 1 and hit Launch. ...

While my NUC homelab handled what I considered “production” workloads using docker and compose, I wanted to play around with and learn Kubernetes. I understood most of the bird’s eye view concepts like pods, deployments, and ingress, but without much hands-on, most of it was fleeting. So I decided to put my spare RAM and CPU on my desktop to good use by installing a complete K3s cluster. A good part of my research was provided concisely on an excellent guide by Tom . ...

Quick links: Git Repo DockerHub Drone Build Heroku Demo I was recently roped into the world of Go (Golang) while working on building the terraform provider for Cisco FMC at work. This beautiful language that amalgamates the speed and friendliness of C to modern creature comforts offered by the likes of Python was a refreshing experience. I had a ton of hands-on with making API calls and handling state in Go. Although I still am yet to explore in-depth the largely uncovered areas of goroutines and channels, before going there, I wanted to understand database ORM modeling, used quite frequently in many backends. ...

If you have read through the previous articles, I have a setup where applications are securely accessible to me from anywhere. That is all well and good until something breaks, and I have to fix it. No big deal when I am home, but how would I do that if what I am trying to fix is the one that helps me access it remotely? Enter Tailscale , a point-to-point mesh VPN topology private LAN overlay over the internet. Tailscale is a game-changer when it comes to VPN technologies. It accomplishes this using WireGuard , another up-and-coming technology for secure, simple tunneling. ...

In the last part of this series, we saw what I had set up for self-hosted applications. Now let me show how I got all these on the internet. For this, the last section is a good background. Let us look at some of the hurdles I had. I have two ISPs, and neither of them provides a static IP. Moreover, one of the ISPs does not even assign a public IP, placing me behind a CGNAT . Managing dynamic DNS records can be a pain. Load balancing them can be a tedious process as well. Forwarding ports can turn out to be a security issue depending on how effectively I implement firewall solutions behind it. All of these added up result in a problem for my network. Another thing to note that I had already moved my domain registrar to Cloudflare owing to its better management UI and fast DNS resolvers. I was impressed by how quickly the DNS changes propagated, making testing things out a smooth experience. ...