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AWS

Karpenter and Why You Should Ditch Cluster Autoscaler

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If you have used Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) you may have experienced that node groups' autoscaling leaves a bit to be desired. It can be slow, clunky to configure, and making use of mixed instance types can be difficult. My biggest complaint? Nodes launch SLOW!

Enter Karpenter. Karpenter is a node provisioner - which now uses the NodePool terminology, similar to GKE and others - that utilizes the EC2 Fleet API to schedule nodes directly to the cluster, without having to be in a managed node group!

Why would you want to do this? How about nodes that launch and reach Ready state in k8s in 10 seconds!

Read on to see how you can scale faster, more reliably, with greater flexibility, and save money by using Karpenter.

Build a MkDocs Site with Terraform and S3

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Find the latest code for this project on my GitHub

Chances are you have seen a website or documentation that make use of MkDocs, and especially Material for MkDocs. In fact, this blog site runs using Material for MkDocs and I have to say it is a delight compared to typical blog or WordPress platforms!

This becomes really powerful - and cost-effective - combined with the ability to host a static website using Amazon S3.

In this post I will show you how to create the AWS resources necessary for hosting your website using Terraform, as well as how to set up a basic MkDocs site.

AWS SSO with Terraform and Secrets Manager

You can find the latest code for this project on GitHub: https://github.com/shadetree-dev/terraform-aws-sso-permission-sets-example

We'll go through a few stages in this journey to get there:

  1. Bitch about SSO a bit and why it's such a burden to deal with
  2. Delegate an administrator for IAM Identity Center (SSO)
  3. Set up some AWS Secrets Manager secrets to pull dynamically from (avoid hard-coding)
  4. Write some Terraform and apply it!