One of the simplest ways to onboard container workloads to Tailscale
Embracing Tailscale in my infrastructure has solved myriad problems for me. Having a way of remotely accessing my infrastructure and services is obviously the main one. I think the technical challenge of learning how to securely expose such things from home would be interesting. But for me carries too much weight of something going very wrong if done poorly. Those connections also all being secured over WireGuard under the hood is also a source of comfort considering how tried and tested that solution is. There is some dealbreakers naturally. Choosing a some what proprietary product (I believe the control plane is the bit here that is) as the backbone of ones networking layer for accessing software that’s freely available to download, has a certain irony. I also believe that in the event of total internet loss at home, I wouldn’t be able to access any of the services on devices literal centimetres away from me. For now though I’m happy to tolerate these things. Tailscale is of a quality to me that I would throw my money at them with very little hesitation if I wasn’t on the free tier anymore and I always think making these commitments on foundational services helps to reduce anxiety and the oft overwhelming feeling of viewing the technical based ice cream parlour selection of what tools to use.
We were on the verge of greatness, we were this close
Reinvigorated after initial failings with LXD, I looked to creating a Scaleway Kosmos Kubernetes cluster. The setup would allow me to have a managed control plane while providing my own compute for the workers. It seemed like the best of both worlds, but unfortunately I encountered an issue that while might be fine for some to continue on, would prove to be a dead end for me.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy
Previously I wrote about how I planned to uplift my self hosting setup to a new standard, implementing new tooling and strategies to enable me to enjoy more of my hobby. That effort is still ongoing however, I’ve felt I needed to change strategies on the fly. Indeed, I wrote about how I wanted to uplift my infrastructure layer to use LXD as a hypervisor along with LXC to enable a transition away from Docker and Docker Compose. I am still working on that transition, but instead the final destination is to my first tech love, Kubernetes.
My new plans for my hobby for this year
I know that I have written about this previously on this blog, but I think everybody goes through their own cycles of highs and lows. Personally, there’s been a lot more lows as of late. Things for the most part of this year have not been feeling amazing, primarily due to events in work. When you have a hobby that is closely related to your work, things can suffer when that compartmentalisation starts to fail. And other things going on in my life meant that generally, things were quite sad feeling.
I have seen the light
Test Driven Development is a topic I have been petrified of for quite some time. It is something that I knew was praised as a development strategy, rightly so as many would argue. I struggled for a long time to even conceptually understand how TDD even worked. The slightly more naive version of brain simply could not cope with the idea of trying to test something before knowing something even existed. Put plainly, how could I assert 2 + 2 = 4 when I did not even have the code to add 2 and 2 together in the first place?
Sticking with my existing website for now
Well, I am writing from my lovely hotel in London, before I jet off towards Iceland. I know I wrote previously on how I was going to work on a brand new website to enable me to create more content. While I was working on that and making quite good progress, including migrating all my old content, I decided to stop the project. The primary reason in the end came down to cost. In general in my life, I’ve embarked on a finance and expenditure journey with the aim of building a state of financial observability. I have goals in terms of home ownership, buying a car. Plus in general I was just spending a lot more than I should month to month. So I am hoping to see at least the initial fruits of that work in the next few months.
We don’t like noise
This will probably be a short one, written while I wait for a hair cut. To help enable my new self hosting efforts I looked to re image my Rapsberry Pis. I needed to upgrade the SD cards in some of them, to 64GB and a thing on my to do list is to introduce some file shares. As part of the upgrade I decided to move towards Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS.
Two unrelated events lead to annoyance
A new perspective
