Chris Vermeulen

My emigration journey

I'm Chris. In 2019 I moved to Germany. This is my story. I'm a South African. I was born in Johannesburg, and moved a fair bit between Johannesburg and Cape Town between 18 and 24. I started working as a software engineer for a gap year, which is on its

Newsletter #1

Hi there fellow techies ! It's been an insane couple weeks at work, but I churned out a couple more posts based off some things we ran into this week, and progressing on the Laravel In Kubernetes series. Laravel in KubernetesI've published the latest instalment of the laravel-in-kubernetes series, which now

Laravel In Kubernetes

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 11 - Adding Let's Encrypt certificates to the application

The next important piece, is for us to add certificates to our application, so our users can securely use our application across the internet. We are going to use Cert Manager to achieve this, as it will automatically provision new certificates for us, as well as renew them on a

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 10 - Exposing the application

Our application is now successfully deployed in Kubernetes, but we need to expose it to the outside world. We can access it locally by running kubectl port-forward svc/laravel-in-kubernetes-webserver 8080:80 and going to http://localhost:8080. We need to expose our application to the outside world though so our

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 9 - Deploying the Laravel Scheduler

In this post, we'll cover deploying the Laravel Scheduler in Kubernetes. The Laravel Scheduler takes care of running tasks / jobs on a set schedule or at specific times. Table of contents Kubernetes Cronjob or Cron in a Container ?There are some differences we need to be aware of before willy-nilly

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 8 - Deploying Laravel Queue workers in Kubernetes

In this post we will cover deploying Laravel Queue workers in Laravel. Deploying Laravel Queue workers in Kubernetes, makes it fairly easy to scale out workers when jobs start piling up, and releasing resources when there is lower load on the system. Table of contents Queue connection updateWe need to

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 7 - Deploying Redis to run Queue workers and cache

In this post, we'll go over deploying a Redis instance, where we can run our Queue workers from in Laravel. The Redis instance can also be used for Caching inside Laravel, or a second Redis cluster can be installed for Cache separately We will cover two methods of running a

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 6 - Deploying Laravel Web App in Kubernetes

In this post we will cover deploying our Laravel Web App inside of Kubernetes. This covers our main app and our migrations in Kubernetes. This post also assumes you have Dockerised your application, using Part 2 & Part 3 from this series. If not, and you have containerised your application,

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 5 - Deploying a database for our application

Deploying a database for our application can be quite a challenge. On one hand, using a managed database makes sense from a management perspective, but might be a bit more expensive than running it ourselves. On the other hand, running it ourselves comes with a whole array of possible maintenance

Laravel In Kubernetes

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 4 - Kubernetes Cluster Setup

In this post, we will spin up our Kubernetes cluster using Terraform, in DigitalOcean. We will create this using Terraform, so we can easily spin up and spin down our cluster, as well as keep all of our information declarative. If you'd like to spin up a cluster without Terraform,

Laravel

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 3 - Container Registries

In this post, we will take our new Dockerfile and layers, and build the images, and push them up to a registry, so we can easily use them in Kubernetes. TLDR - Laravel In Kubernetes Part 3Laravel In Kubernetes Part 3. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.Gist262588213843476Table

Laravel In Kubernetes

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 2 - Dockerizing Laravel

In this part of the series, we are going to Dockerise our Laravel application with different layers, for all the different technical pieces of our application (FPM, Web Server, Queues, Cron etc.) We will do this by building layers for each process, copy in the codebase, and build separate containers

Coding mistakes I've made

Here I will list some of the simple bugs, which cost me lots and lots of time to debug Database multi insert Muti inserts are used to speed up inserting records into a database. You can essentially insert multiple records on one database call. Saves connections and cursors. -- Single

Laravel In Kubernetes

Laravel in Kubernetes Part 1 - Installing Laravel

This series will show you how to go from laravel new to Laravel running in Kubernetes, including monitoring, logging, exposing and bunch more. Part 1 of this series covers creating a new laravel installation which we can deploy in Kubernetes. TLDR; Laravel In Kubernetes Part 1Laravel In Kubernetes Part 1.

Switching off sticky sessions in Openshift routes

I had some trouble a while ago implementing a canary deployment using internal scaling. When I started calling the route, I noticed that all requests were being served from the same pod. Obviously this was caused by sticky sessions. How do you switch them off ? It's quite simple in Openshift

git

Git Ignore files globally

Often times, ignoring files locally without editing .gitignore, can be quite useful. You can do this globally, or locally by just using pure git.

gitlab

Using Gitlab Private Registry with Kubernetes

How to use your private Gitlab Registry with your Kubernetes cluster.

Using systemd to run a simple process and keep it up

Short post about using systemd to run a simple process :) You'll need a service file.For the most part systemd services are registered in config files stored in /etc/systemd/system/XXX.service For example, running a minecraft server would look like this: # /etc/systemd/system/minecraft-server.service [Unit] Description=