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NixOS Declarative Approach for Operating System Management

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Arch Linux is my favourite distribution for long time. I can get the benefit of bleeding-edge and highly configurable system, yet still manageable with its lovely package management like pacman, AUR and additionally brew. I also use ansible / chef to manage the workstations / VMs for the sake of immutability. But, managing the playbooks takes time even for doing simple things.

In distrowatch, there are page hit ranks and I already familiar with most of them in the list and I found NixOS there, which I haven’t used. I interested with the declarative configuration approach that NixOS offer to manage the system. Go straight to the documentation rightaway, and try it in VM. Aaaand.. I got overwhelmed at first with the nix language. 30 minutes learning the configurations, finally I can make the configuration usable and enjoying it more than Arch! The offered approach allows us to manage the workstations from zero just by utilizing the nix configurations, so we technically having an immutable system!

Bulding Docker Image with Cloud Builder

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0700

Docker BuildKit has been there since couple years back and its become default builder to replace the legacy builder since Docker Desktop 23.0. I really like this BuildKit since its offers some helpful features. The one that I mostly feel help was the build cache which can possibly save some build time and also the data used to download the dependencies of your image.

Recently, I just got to know about Docker Build Cloud which allows us to build our image with cloud builder. I got to know when I try to built some images and it takes long time to complete and decided to read the docs and found out there is Docker Build Cloud section. Docker Build Cloud is part of the buildx and available for personal use with usage up to 50 build minutes every month. With this, your build will be offloaded to the cloud instance as well as the cache, so no need to worry when your Internet is problematic or your machine is not strong enough to build the image.

Ressurection of My Homelab

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0700

1.5 years living in Singapore makes me put down my homelab. Despite I already made the environment accessible as possible, apparently its still has lot of issues due to Indonesia ISP unstability and also electricity issues. Since now I currently in Indonesia, I was decided to wake them up again!

The Born of the Undead

I put my homelab in my working room, and since my house was empty and no one take care of it, then yaaa! Its fully covered by dusts. Unfortunately, several devices completely dead. I tried to turn on everything, zonk! I need to start from scratch again. Since I don’t want to spend too much time building it at once, I started to pick up one of the machine that I often used for hypervisor. My DeskMini X300 is still solid AsRock! I was using plain LibVirt in the past and manage everyting using terraform-libvirt which allows me to manage everything through pipeline. But, this time I try to do differently.

Build Kubernetes QEMU/KVM Image with Packer

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 15:24:00 +0000

Packer is a tools to automate creation of multiple machine images build by Hashicorp. Its support multiple builders such as AWS EC2, DigitalOcean, LXD, VMWare, QEMU, etc. In this post, I will share how to create a packer template to build kubernetes image for QEMU/KVM on top of Ubuntu minimal cloud image based on my homelab setup.

Prerequisites

packer
cloud-localds (from cloud-image-utils in ubuntu)
QEMU/KVM enabled host

Step by Step

Ensure you have QEMU/KVM enabled host, and also packer installed in your machine. If you use Linux, you could use following commands:

First Experience as a Tech Lead

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 01:58:00 +0000

Last year, I got offered and trust to be a lead in my team. To be honest, that was my first time I become a lead in my career. First thing that come to my mind was,

If I become a lead, then I will have N peoples that will be my responsibility, I will be one of the factor of their good and bad

That was not easy choice, but thanks to my supportive lead and also supportive colleague. I become a lead for about six months and that was a great experiences!

Does Infra Testing Really Matters?

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 01:05:00 +0000

Story

In previous post, I already share my experience when tried to automate manual process by created script to automatically create configs based on the input in requests. We found that the script are useful enough at that time, and reduced number of incidents caused by misconfiguration (yay!). Unfortunately, we faced with issues when the provisioned infrastructure not work as expected which caused by several things, example: invalid port definition which (again) inputted by human.

How Scripting Make My Life Easier

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 00:12:00 +0000

Story

Did you ever worked in repetitive tasks? I was worked as an operational cloud infrastructure engineer. Starting from received several ticket from developers who needs infrastructure, gathering informations for their needs, double check the requests, and everything done manually by myself.. Ouch! Even worse if we missed something from the request, ta-daaa! Incident happened and another requests got delayed.

It does happened to me (and my team) about past one-half years ago. We already tried to be more details, carefully read the requests, but it doesn’t work. The problem itself come from the very basic actor, human. Luckily, the ticket format and the process itself already standardized. Hmm.. Looked back and compared with current requests and I was thinking and tried to remove manual verification process by human. Why don’t we automate the process?

Stream Twitter Statuses with Tweepy

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 20:47:00 +0000

Flashback to several years ago when I was using Twitter and learn text mining. At that time, I used python to collects twitter statuses with specific keywords / terms defined and then stored all of those statuses to csv as dataset for text mining learning. In this article, I will share how to stream twitter statuses with python using tweepy module but in this article, I only print the status without store it to a file or database.

Test Your Ansible Role with Test Kitchen

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 07:22:00 +0000

Its been a while I am using Ansible as a tool for configuration management. There was some conditions where I created a roles with multiple dependencies, or I have to revisit an ancient roles created by someone else in the past. It doesn’t matter if the roles are well tested, how if its untested or doesn’t have tests at all?

In the past, I test ansible role by creating a vagrant box and run ansible playbook in it. After that, re-run the playbook and check by login into the box. The testing are created together with playbook creation. Which for me is very time consuming.

Immutable Infrastructure using Terraform

Sat, 12 May 2018 07:22:00 +0000

What is Terraform?

Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

OK, that’s the first answer when you questioning about “what is Terraform”. Terraform is a tool built by Hashicorp for infrastructure management. It’s based on Go, so you can easily install it by downloading the binary into your machine.

Why Using Terraform?

This is a good question, we know that there are some tools besides Terraform for infrastructure management that commonly used out there like Ansible, Chef, or CloudFormation (if you use AWS).