🔍 Quick Overview: Struggling with bloated etcd memory and disk usage? Join me as I walk through diagnosing conflicting metrics, discover a zero-downtime defragmentation tool, and automate a CronJob that slashed my etcd footprint from gigabytes to megabytes-keeping my Kubernetes control plane lean and highly available.
As a DevOps engineer, automation is second nature to me. But outside of work, I'm also into photography, and I own a Canon 80D. One of the biggest pains for me has always been sorting RAW files into manageable folders. The same applies to pictures exported from my phone—sorting them manually into year/month folders based on their creation date was tedious and error-prone.
With the recent release of Pi-hole v6, I decided to revisit the challenge of setting up high availability (HA) for Pi-hole in a Kubernetes environment. While Pi-hole has always been a great self-hosted DNS sinkhole, running it in a highly available way has been tricky—mainly due to its reliance on SQLite databases, which don’t support concurrent access across multiple replicas.
Using smart plugs to monitor appliance power consumption is a common practice. Many of these devices come with built-in power metering, making them useful for gathering statistics. The question then becomes: what tools should you use? In this case, the hardware of choice is Shelly devices, as they offer a wide variety of options.
Ah, GitOps. The magical buzzword that everyone pretends they've been using for years. Because, obviously, if you're not managing your infrastructure like it's just another codebase, are you even DevOps-ing?