How to configure the IBM Cloud Operator for an existing Cloudant service?

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Kubernetes Operators are an awesome way to simplify work for developers to setup and maintain complex applications in Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift.

The IBM Cloud Operator provides you the ability to bind IBM Cloud services to your applications running in Kubernetes or RedHat OpenShift and create, update, and delete IBM Cloud services from within the cluster by calling Kubernetes APIs, instead of needing to use several IBM Cloud APIs in addition to configuring your app for Kubernetes.

That example shows how to bind an existing Cloudant service instance in IBM Cloud to an application running in Red Hat OpenShift. The content of the example is related to the usage of the Red Hat OpenShift with IBM Cloud Open Labs. In these labs you can use a preconfigured OpenShift environment for four hours at no charge to run workshops by your own. By the way, here you can find the related source code for the examples.

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Write your first simple Kubernetes Operator

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Ask your human Operator to do all the complicated ugly work for you!

… or write your own Operator, if you are the expert and you know how the complicated ugly work, works in detail. This is how you can make sure it works in the future šŸ˜‰

For those of you who donā€™t know Kubernetes Operators in combination with Ansible, let me just give you a very simplified description from my point of view:

Even a student with minimal knowledge of Kubernetes should be able to install a highly complex container-based application on top of Kubernetes or OpenShift. Eliminate the manual interaction effort as much as possible to deploy, run, and maintain your containerized application on Kubernetes or OpenShift with your Operator implementation.


During my search on the internet, how to build an own custom Kubernetes Operator, I came along to that awesome YouTube video with a talk from Keith Tenzer, he gave in 2020 on the Open Infrastructure Foundation Summit called ā€œBuilding Kubernetes Operators with the Operator Framework and Ansibleā€.

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Install VirtualBox and setup a virtual machine with Ubuntu on MacOS

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This blog post does contain a very short cheat sheet for me and maybe it is also useful for you: How to install VirtualBox and setup a virtual machine with Ubuntu on a Mac OS host system, by using various documentation resources from the internet.

Step 1: Download and install the latest VirtualBox on your Mac (pay attention to the Oracle Licensing, when you start using VirtualBox).

Step 2: Be aware of the system security preferences settings. You can follow the instructions from this awesome very short blog post, written by Xilin Sun. That will help you to avoid following Error:

Solving VirtualBox ā€œkernel driver not installed (rc=-1908)ā€ Error on macOS

Step 3: Download an iso image file from the Ubuntu webpage for your installation.

Step 4: Follow these instructions which are written by the About the Biometric Research Program. The instructions are for a Windows operating system, but I would say, you can easily map the content to a Mac0S installation.

And by the way also useful to know is:

Maybe this was useful for you and letā€™s see whatā€™s next?

Greetings,

Thomas

#VirtualBox, #Ubuntu

Absolute beginner Node-RED flow

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The motivation for that blog post is: When I support Hackathons I notice there’s often a lack of programming knowledge and building UIs, but they have awesome ideas. If this is the case, then Node-RED is a perfect starting point to realize a prototype at a hackathon. The dashboard of Node-RED is a awesome way to build a UI, but there was a “out of the box” Node missing to simply add a table. Now I found a very useful Node thatā€™s create a table inside a Node-RED dashboard.

Thatā€™s motivated me to create an example GitHub project, which provides an example to build a simple application from scratch.

The gif shows the simple functionality of the flow.

  • Enter a new user
  • Search for lastname
  • Inspect result
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How to install MkDocs on Mac and setup the integration to GitHub pages?

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This blog post contains the simplified steps, how to setup MkDocs for a GitHub project to use it with GitHub Pages. I won’t covering details about the background. The blog post is for me a little cheat sheet and maybe it is also useful for you. Steve Martinelli created an awesome blog post in that context called 5 Features I Like About Material for MkDoc.

Here an example GitHub project, which is based on the setup I documented in this blog post: https://thomassuedbroecker.github.io/How-to-install-MkDocs-on-Mac-and-setup-integration-with-GitHub/

The gif shows the example project documentation:

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What do you think about the OWASP web application security top ten as a developer?

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I like the OWASP Top Ten for “developers” charts. From my point of view, it gives an awesome advice, where to start or helps to take care and remember what you maybe already know about web security implementation. From my side it feels a bit like “rub salt into the wound” of a developer soul, isn’t it so? Especially when you starting developing cloud native and microservices based applications.

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Get started with IBM Cloud – a student perspective

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In this new blog post I want to address a common situation I see students facing: there are several cloud providers and you want to check out the different platforms. The reason is you want to be prepared; for example working with cloud resources related to courses at your university or for a hackathon. One of these cloud providers is IBM Cloud and this blog post is about how to get started with IBM Cloud. This is a tailored version of my blog post: How to prepare for a Hackathon with IBM Cloud for you as a student.

IBM Cloud provides a wide range and huge amount of different services, runtimes, and more. It covers both virtual and hardware ā€“based servers on one demand cloud-platform, which means you have complete infrastructure control. One of the great things about IBM Cloud is that you can register for an account and try before you buy without needing a credit card.

From my point of view, one of the most important objectives for student is to have a running application instance live.

To do this you need a runtime šŸ˜‰

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Getting started with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) using Tekton and an Open Toolchain on IBM Cloud (Part 3/3)

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This blog post is about the last 14 min video for my YouTube playlist related to the hands-on tutorial “Develop a Kubernetes app by using Tekton delivery pipelines“. In this video we do the final setup of the toolchain and then we execute a Tekton pipeline. For more background please visit my first blog post “Getting started with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) using Tekton and an Open Toolchain on IBM Cloud (Part 1/3)“.

Note: The video was live recorded and it would take 30 min for the entire session, but I did reduce the time of the video to only 14 min ;-).

But now the video could be sometimes a little bit (too) fast.

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Getting started with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) using Tekton and an Open Toolchain on IBM Cloud (Part 2/3)

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This blog post is about my newly created 9 min YouTube video about the setup of the prerequisites for the hands-on tutorial “Develop a Kubernetes app by using Tekton delivery pipelines“. That video is a part of the video series for the tutorial. For more details please visit my last blog post “Getting started with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) using Tekton and an Open Toolchain on IBM Cloud (Part 1/3)“

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Getting started with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) using Tekton and an Open Toolchain on IBM Cloud (Part 1/3)

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In this blog post I want to highlight that I created a 10 min detailed overview YouTube video, which is the first video of a video series related to the hands-on tutorial “Develop a Kubernetes app by using Tekton delivery pipelines“. In that tutorial video series, we setup an easy consumable Tekton pipeline in a toolchain using developer tools for think, code and deploy in context of continuous delivery. We deploy a containerized web application to a free Kubernetes Cluster on IBM Cloud.

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