2 super cool things which distracted me away from my VMCA studying :)

Ok Folks, 

You know how it is, you have something on the calendar and need to focus solely on that and right during those moments on cue the little devil in your ear whispers, “hey check out these 2 utilities that you have not seen yet”. 

Well, I managed to fight off temptation long enough to pass my VMCA exam but you can bet that right after cycling back home instead of resting my exhausted brain, it was time to turn on the CLI!!

Devilish distraction number 1 “BAT”

So you use cat to checkout files? Did you known that a cat can add a bat and then you end up with that: 

batcat pod.yaml

You can find more info here: https://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/bat-linux-command-a-cat-clone-with-written-in-rust/

Devilish distraction number 2 “KindScaler”

I have to admit that I could not wait with this one and jumped away from the Veeam User Guide for a good 30 minutes to indulge. The thing is that if you use Kind (Kubernetes in Docker) for testing it is a pain if you setup a cluster and then want to scale it, because, you can’t, which means you have to destroy the cluster and recreate. However, this script lets you do exactly that “scale your Kind Cluster”!

https://github.com/lobuhi/kindscaler

Let’s say I create a small Kind cluster and then decide that I need to add either some more control-plane or worker nodes:

Here is a simple yaml Kind config file which will create a cluster comprised of one control-plane node and one worker node: cluster1worker.yaml

kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
  - role: control-plane
    extraPortMappings:
    - containerPort: 30000
      hostPort: 30000
      protocol: TCP
  - role: worker

Create the Cluster:

kind create cluster --config cluster1worker.yaml

kubectl get nodes

Now lets go get Kindscaler:

git clone https://github.com/lobuhi/kindscaler.git

cd kindscaler

Let’s add 2 more control-plane nodes and 3 more worker nodes:

./kindscaler.sh kind -r control-plane -c 2

And off it goes:

kubectl get nodes

Now for the worker nodes:

./kindscaler.sh kind -r worker -c 3

The moral of this story is that if you have an exam to study for, don’t be tempted to digress and play with super cool toys that suddenly, as if by chance, appear on your horizons.