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2024

Running Llama on Rackspace Cloud

In one of my favourite movie series The Avengers, Tony Stark (Iron Man) creates this Artificial Intelligence (AI) named Jarvis, which helps him make much of his other works possible. This portrayal sparks curiosity: Are such sophisticated AIs possible in real life? Until a few years ago, AI capabilities like JARVIS were confined to the realm of science fiction. However, advancements in AI have bridged the gap between fantasy and reality, making powerful, customizable AI models accessible to enthusiasts and professionals alike.

Kustomize: Using environment variables for configuration

Kustomize is a widely used tool for Kuberenetes config management that provides a template free way to change your manifests during application deployment. It uses a kustomization.yaml file to define the actions taken during the build process. The file itself can be seen a collection of optional ordered processes: resources, generators, transformers, validators, configMapGenerator, patches and so on.

We wont dive too deep into these but look at a specific way of using the transformer property to use configuration values (as environment variables) from a file to drive your configuration.

Fortify Your Kubernetes Clusters: Encrypting Secrets with Sealed-Secrets

Introduction

In today's cloud-native world, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes secrets are essential for storing sensitive data like passwords, API keys, and database credentials for workloads running on Kubernetes clusters.

However, many teams encounter a common issue while interacting with Kubernetes secrets:

  • The inadvertent exposure of the sensitive secrets when stored in version control systems.
  • Kubernetes secrets are base64 encoded. Base64 encoding can be easily decoded, leading to significant security vulnerabilities, including unauthorized access and potential data breaches.

To address this issue, various solutions exist, but in this blog, we will focus on one: sealed-secrets.

We will walk through a practical example of how to use sealed-secrets to secure your Kubernetes secrets, ensuring they are both version-controlled and protected.

Choosing Your Kubernetes Guardian: Ingress Controllers, Envoy GatewayAPI, or Istio?

Introduction

In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud-native applications, effectively managing traffic within a Kubernetes cluster is essential for optimizing performance, enhancing security, and achieving scalability. Several popular solutions have emerged to address these challenges, including Envoy, Envoy GatewayAPI, Ingress Controllers, and Istio. However, users often face confusion when deciding which solution best suits their specific use cases. In this blog post, we will explore the differences and similarities assisting you in selecting the optimal tool based on your requirements.

  • in General
  • 18 min read

Getting Started With Rackspace OpenStack Flex

We're now mid-way through 2024, and the Rackspace Public Cloud team has been hard at work building and delivering the successor to the Rackspace OpenStack Public Cloud (OSPC) first launched in 2012. As Limited Availability (LA) access to our latest multi-tenant OpenStack-based public cloud approaches and content begins to build up here on the blog, I thought it prudent to provide guidance on how one might onboard themselves and build resources on the platform.

Dealing with SSH MAC Limitations in Modern Systems

Modern SSH configurations can sometimes lead to MAC (Message Authentication Code) limitations when connecting between systems with different client setups. I've recently run into this issue when operating from a Mac and connecting to newer operating systems, like NixOS. These limitations can be frustrating, but they are fixable with minimal effort. This post will show you how to change your SSH client to use an appropriate MAC, even if it's not explicitly allowed in your configuration.

Building NixOS from Another OS to Use as NixOS on OpenStack

A wordy title, but it was fun to write and hammers on "OS;" OpenStack / Operating System. With the release of OpenStack Flex, we have opened up some much needed ease of operation and functionality into our multi-tenant OpenStack platform. One of the many new features in our public cloud is the ability to simply create and manage custom images. In this blog post, we will guide you through creating a NixOS 24.05 QCOW2 image which is cloud ready. We'll use resources found in the nixos-openstack GitHub repository and we'll build all of this from Ubuntu within OpenStack Flex.