Blog – The Database Me

Using etcd as Patroni DCS with the Zalando Postgres Operator

TheDatabaseMe
28. March 202328. March 2023

Patroni is a reliable cluster software for Postgres which, when running on Kubernetes, can use the Kubernetes API itself as DCS (Distributed Config Store). This is very nice, but on Kubernetes clusters with an unreliable API / Controlplane, this can lead to demotion of your cluster leader and thereby unhappy users. Gladly, Patroni supports other setups as DCS like etcd.

A pinch of salt – Encrypt WAL-G PostgreSQL backups

TheDatabaseMe
19. February 202319. February 2023

WAL-G is a widely known backup software for Postgres databases. One of it’s features is to backup to S3 storage out of the box. Also it’s capable to encrypt those backups and WAL archives with several encryption methods (e.g. libsodium). Since WAL-G is implemented within the Zalanndo Spilo image and therefore deployed by default with the Zalando Postgres Operator on Kubernetes, I had a deeper look on how to get encrypted backups implemented there, cause this is not documented well.

Game cache – Setup local Steam cache that plays nice with piHole

TheDatabaseMe
4. February 20234. February 2023

Having a weak internet connection and a huge Steam game collection at the same time can be hard to manage. Since many years there is the LAN Cache project, which provides a DNS interception between your Steam client and the actual download servers of Steam. But having this play nicely with my piHole setup was not so easy.

Enhanced with plugins – Make ArgoCD more powerful with plugins running as sidecar

TheDatabaseMe
2. December 20228. February 2023

The power of ArgoCD can be enhanced by the use of so called plugins. A plugin will operate during a refresh operation. It has access to the checked out repository and may manipulate data before syncing it to your Kubernetes clusters. I use it for encrypt my git-crypt encrypted repositories, before manifests will get applied to my Kubernetes cluster.

Dip it – Deploy Apache Guacamole on Kubernetes

TheDatabaseMe
13. November 20229. December 2022

With Apache Guacamole, you can use all kind of different remote desktop protocols (like SSH, VNC, RDP) to access your remote machines. Guacamole can run fine on Docker, but it’s a bit tricky to deploy on a Kubernetes environment. I haven’t found an existing deployment for the current version of Guacamole, so I decided to create my own.

SHORTY – Add binaries to a Kubernetes Pod using an Init container

TheDatabaseMe
18. October 202212. December 2022

In this short article, I want to show you, how you easily can “inject” binaries to a Kubernetes Pod / Container, without building your own customized image for it. We can do so by using Init-Containers.

What a golden boy – Use Packer to build Proxmox images

TheDatabaseMe
16. October 202212. December 2022

We use Hashicorps Packer to build virtual machine templates within Proxmox. They can then easily be used to create brand new virtual machines from.

Self build AWX execution environment

TheDatabaseMe
9. September 202212. December 2022

Out from recent troubles with the official AWX EE image, I decided to try out to build my own EE image using the ansible-builder and use it in my AWX homelab environment.

Building and pushing – Use Github Actions to build and push Docker images

TheDatabaseMe
2. July 20229. December 2022

One can use Github Actions as CI/CD tool to build and push your Docker images from your repositories Dockerfile and to your Docker image registry of choice. You may want to use shell commands for that but there is a more refined way to do it in Github Actions, using existing Action Modules.