JINJA2 With Python Tutorial JINJA Ansible Howto

Posted on December 17, 2024December 17, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

JINJA2 is a powerful yet easy to use templating engine that enables easily generating documents on the fly blending one or more objects with a template.

Since the syntax is heavily inspired by Django and Python, JINJA2 is not only commonly used inside Python scripts: it is very often exploited by Ansible, for example when generating configuration files on the fly.

In "JINJA2 With Python Tutorial JINJA Ansible Howto" post we will learn all the must know about JINJA2, and experiment with it by writing a real-life JINJA2 template file, rendering it by merging it with a JSON document using a custom Python script and an Ansible playbook.

Kubernetes Prometheus And Grafana With kube-prometheus-stack

Posted on November 27, 2024November 30, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

When using Kubernetes, it is mandatory to collect performance metrics so as to be able to plot them into meaningful graphs (a must-have during troubleshooting), visualize alerts in dashboards and get email notification of critical events. The best practice is to deploy Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager.

In the "Kubernetes Prometheus And Grafana With kube-prometheus-stack" post we see how to easily deploy and setup these three amazing components to setup a full featured alerting and performance monitoring solution.

The post also shows how to deploy additional Grafana Dashboards and how to deploy custom Prometheus rules to trigger application specific alerts.

NetApp Astra Trident Tutorial NFS Kubernetes CSI HowTo

Posted on November 20, 2024April 2, 2025 by Marco Antonio Carcano

NetApp is certainly one of the most popular storage brands, with quite a big portfolio of cost-effective storage solutions. With the spreading of Kubernetes, they developed Trident, their own Container Storage Interface (CSI) compatible storage orchestrator.

In the "NetApp Astra Trident Tutorial NFS Kubernetes CSI HowTo" we see how easy it is to deploy and set it up.

RKE2 Tutorial – RKE2 Howto On Oracle Linux 9

Posted on November 6, 2024November 20, 2024 by Marco Antonio Carcano

Kubernetes is certainly the most popular and probably the best solution for orchestrating containerized workloads, but maintaining its vanilla distribution is certainly a challenge, so you must carefully guess pros and cons in terms of maintenance costs and operational risks.

A very cost effective and interesting alternative to running the vanilla Kubernetes is the "Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2" (RKE2), a certified Kubernetes distribution focused on security to adhere to the U.S. government’s compliance requirement. RKE2, besides providing a reliable Kubernetes distribution, smoothly integrates with Rancher.

In the "RKE2 Tutorial - RKE2 Howto On Oracle Linux 9" post we see it in action, installing a highly available multi-master Kubernetes cluster, exposing the default ingress controller using MetalLB for providing Load Balancing services.

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.