Kubernetes, connection timeouts, and the importance of labels

Kubernetes, connection timeouts, and the importance of labels
We are working with an application that produces resource utilization reports for clients of our OpenShift-based cloud environments. The developers working with the application have been reporting mysterious issues concerning connection timeouts between the application and the database (a MariaDB instance). For a long time we had only high-level verbal descriptions of the problem (“I’m seeing a lot of connection timeouts!”) and a variety of unsubstantiated theories (from multiple sources) about the cause.
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Kubernetes External Secrets

Kubernetes External Secrets
At $JOB we maintain the configuration for our OpenShift clusters in a public git repository. Changes in the git repository are applied automatically using ArgoCD and Kustomize. This works great, but the public nature of the repository means we need to find a secure solution for managing secrets (such as passwords and other credentials necessary for authenticating to external services). In particular, we need a solution that permits our public repository to be the source of truth for our cluster configuration, without compromising our credentials.
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Connecting OpenShift to an External Ceph Cluster

Red Hat’s OpenShift Data Foundation (formerly “OpenShift Container Storage”, or “OCS”) allows you to either (a) automatically set up a Ceph cluster as an application running on your OpenShift cluster, or (b) connect your OpenShift cluster to an externally managed Ceph cluster. While setting up Ceph as an OpenShift application is a relatively polished experienced, connecting to an external cluster still has some rough edges. NB I am not a Ceph expert.
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Getting started with KSOPS

Kustomize is a tool for assembling Kubernetes manifests from a collection of files. We’re making extensive use of Kustomize in the operate-first project. In order to keep secrets stored in our configuration repositories, we’re using the KSOPS plugin, which enables Kustomize to use sops to encrypt/files using GPG. In this post, I’d like to walk through the steps necessary to get everything up and running. Set up GPG We encrypt files using GPG, so the first step is making sure that you have a GPG keypair and that your public key is published where other people can find it.
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Object storage with OpenShift Container Storage

Object storage with OpenShift Container Storage
OpenShift Container Storage (OCS) from Red Hat deploys Ceph in your OpenShift cluster (or allows you to integrate with an external Ceph cluster). In addition to the file- and block- based volume services provided by Ceph, OCS includes two S3-api compatible object storage implementations. The first option is the Ceph Object Gateway (radosgw), Ceph’s native object storage interface. The second option called the “Multicloud Object Gateway”, which is in fact a piece of software named Noobaa, a storage abstraction layer that was acquired by Red Hat in 2018.
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