$ cat post/the-blinking-cursor-/-i-ssh-to-ghosts-of-boxes-/-the-service-persists.md
the blinking cursor / I ssh to ghosts of boxes / the service persists
Title: Kubernetes Conundrums and GitOps Glimpses
January 29, 2018 was just another day in the tech world of that era. Kubernetes had already solidified its place as a leader in container orchestration, but there were still a lot of questions about how it would fit into the larger picture of DevOps and platform engineering. I was deep in a project at work, working with our ops team to migrate our services from manual deployments to automated ones using Kubernetes. The excitement around tools like Helm, Istio, Envoy, and serverless architectures like AWS Lambda was palpable, but it often felt like the ground beneath us kept shifting.
One of my biggest challenges was debugging a persistent issue with our deployment pipeline. We were using Kubernetes to manage our application deployments, but we kept running into a weird problem where certain pods wouldn’t start properly after an upgrade. The logs would show a brief attempt at starting and then they’d just sit there, seemingly frozen in time. I spent hours digging through the cluster’s logs and checking configurations until one day, during my second cup of coffee, it hit me—Prometheus to the rescue!
We had Prometheus monitoring our services but hadn’t set up alerts for every single metric. Once we enabled alerting on memory usage and CPU metrics, a pattern emerged: right before the pods failed to start properly, there was a sudden spike in resource utilization that was causing them to be evicted. It wasn’t just about Kubernetes; it was about understanding how all the pieces worked together.
This experience led me down a rabbit hole of learning more about GitOps. The term “GitOps” was starting to gain traction around this time, and I found myself intrigued by its promise of treating infrastructure as code. We started implementing a simple GitOps strategy where our ops team would push changes into a git repository that automatically updated the Kubernetes cluster. It felt like a game changer, but there were still kinks to work out.
On the side, I was keeping up with all the latest tech news, and some of it seemed almost too good to be true. The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities on CPUs made me rethink how secure my systems really are, even the humble Raspberry Pi wasn’t immune. It’s a constant reminder that we can’t take security for granted.
The net neutrality debate was raging, with Mozilla taking legal action against the FCC’s repeal. In a way, it felt like an echo of the debates around cloud providers and their control over infrastructure. I couldn’t help but think about how these issues would impact our ability to innovate freely in tech.
As I reflect on this day, 2018 seems so far away yet not too long ago. Kubernetes was still finding its footing, GitOps was a nascent idea, and the landscape of tech is forever changing. It’s moments like these that remind me how much there is to learn and adapt to in our field.
That’s my reflection from January 29, 2018. The tech world keeps moving forward, but sometimes it’s good to pause and look back at where we’ve been.