Rancher Tutorial – Rancher Howto Install On Oracle Linux 9

Posted on October 29, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Rancher is a complete software stack for managing multiple Kubernetes clusters either on a public cloud or on premises. With the first stable release issued in 2016, it has slowly improved its feature set and become more and more popular. Currently it is probably the best option for managing Kubernetes clusters.

In the "Rancher Tutorial - Rancher Howto Install On Oracle Linux 9" post we see it in action learning how to to quickly deploy and install it on a Oracle Linux 9 platform, so to be able to immediately start playing with it and learning how this amazing tool can really simplify your life when dealing with Kubernetes.

HAProxy Tutorial – A Clean And Tidy Configuration Structure

Posted on October 15, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

One of the HAProxy strengths is not being very strict about its configuration structure, enabling it to create configurations suitable for fitting very messy scenarios. Sadly this is also its biggest maintainability pitfall: especially if you want to automate its configuration using automation tools and templates, it is up to you to define the best possible standard configuration structure fitting your needs.

The "HAProxy Tutorial - A Clean And Tidy Configuration Structure" post is an insight providing guidelines on how to structure the HAProxy configuration in an effective way, promoting the sharing of floating IP addresses and using easy to edit maps for load balancing the traffic forwarding it to the correct destination. In addition to that, it also provides a way for splitting the statistics so to have them displayed only for the scope of each specific balanced service instead of as a whole.

High Available HA Proxy Tutorial With Keepalived

Posted on October 3, 2024October 1, 2025 by Marco Antonio Carcano

HAProxy is certainly one of the most blazoned, fast and efficient (in terms of processor and memory usage) open source load balancer and proxy, enabling both TCP and HTTP-based applications to spread requests across multiple servers. In the "High Available HA Proxy Tutorial With Keepalived" we see not only how to install it in a High Available fashion, but also how to set the configuration in a clean and tidy way, having it automatically fetched from a Git remote repository.

Git With Python HowTo GitPython Tutorial And PyGit2 Tutorial

Posted on September 11, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Interacting with Git using Python is a very common use case in the DevOps field: very often it is necessary to checkout application’s or scripts along with their configuration or even just checkout versioned configurations. Although more rare, it is sometimes necessary to update the checked out contents and push the committed version back to the “origin” remote repository. In the "Git With Python HowTo GitPython Tutorial And PyGit2 Tutorial" post we play with the two most commonly used Python libraries used to interconnect to Git: gitpython and pygit2.

OpenID Connect With Kratos And Hydra Tutorial – Gitea OAuth

Posted on August 14, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect are broadly used frameworks to address delegating of authentication and authorization. Despite their popularity they are such complex to be a tough nut to crack even for veterans: the scenarios and use cases they cover are very security sensitive and wide, so acquainting them is certainly a huge challenge very often causing a lot of pain and frustration.

The "OpenID Connect With Kratos And Hydra Tutorial - Gitea OAuth" post aim is to provide a good starting point for exploring this tough topic: after a short but comprehensive overview of them, we quickly focus on a real life scenario installing a full featured on premise suite made of Ory Kratos (the IDM), Ory Hydra (the OpenID Connect and OAuth 2 API) and the Ory Kratos Self Service UI node (the Resource Server - in this case it is just a demo).

Once the suite is up and running, we also explore a real life use case implementing the OAUth2 Authorization Code grant by configuring OpenID Connect as an authentication source into a Gitea instance.

Ansible roles best practices: practical example gitea role

Posted on July 9, 2024November 14, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Ansible roles are reusable objects that provide specialized tasks lists, handlers, templates and resource files within a single delivery unit: these objects can be directly accessed from the filesystem, downloaded from Git, from the online Ansible Galaxy of from a Ansible Galaxy compatible local service, such as Pulp 3. Anyway writing custom roles is really a challenging task, especially designing them to be as easy to use and maintain as possible.

The “Ansible roles best practices: practical example gitea role”post guides you into developing a custom Ansible role using a clean and tidy design that you can use as a reference to develop other custom roles.

As use case, we see how to deploy Gitea, a blazoned full featured Git Web UI supporting multiple organizations, providing authentication and authorization facilities enabling to protect repositories and branches, supporting Merge Requests and a lot of other advanced features, with of even a powerful and well standardized API that can be easily exploited by your automations. And, last but not least, ... it is even Java-free.