Configuration Central

It was an eventful weekend. We were able to get out of the house a couple times as a family. Yesterday, we went to a nearby park and went for a walk on the trails. We found this park last week, and it's really nice. It's a fairly short loop of a trail, but it has an awesome lookout over a beautiful lake. Apparently, there was an alligator there earlier in the week, but he was taken out. We did get to see about 10 turtles, though, which my little girl loved. Today, we decided to venture to the beach. I thought it might be a bad idea, given it's the weekend and everybody's been itching to get to the beach, but I figured I better appease my fiancé and go along with it. The first place we went to, the parking lot was full. It was a pretty small lot and I think the beach would have been less populated, but there was no way to get in. Right down the road, there was another, more public beach we decided to try. We got lucky and found a parking space pretty quickly, unpacked everything and started lugging it to the beach. As soon as we crested the sand dunes, we saw the throngs of people. It was packed, and it didn't seem like anyone really cared about social distancing. We made the decision to turn back, and although my little girl did not appreciate it, I think it was the right thing to do. We were able to sneak in a few minutes at the pool before we put her down for a nap, so it wasn't a total wash.

I've been pretty busy with this microservices course all weekend, learning a lot about brand new things to me. I've gone from basically zero knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes, to having a cluster for a fairly small site up and running. When I checked in yesterday, I was in trouble with a rough build. I'm using Skaffold to hook everything up for development purposes, and couldn't get it to work correctly. At first, I realized it was because I had the wrong extension on my files for the client application. I fixed this, but my errors still persisted. After deleting all of the images of my Docker containers and rebuilding them, I was still running into the same errors. After many hours of struggle, I realized I was a dingus. It wasn't an error I was seeing. I thought the build had stalled out, but I didn't realize that when Skaffold dev starts up, it stays running. My application was running all along and I was just reading the logs incorrectly. I felt like I wasted a lot of time, but I think I actually learned quite a bit through the struggle. It's funny because, as soon as I wrapped that lecture up, we finished up the project anyways. I didn't even get to use the development server past that point.

In the next section, we started a much larger application that mimics StubHub. It will have several services involved, including an authentication, orders, tickets, and several others. I had noticed this system was really lagging up my computer. Between running Docker and Kubernetes and running React Native on a daily basis, my 2012 Macbook just can't take it anymore. In this section of the course, Stephen Grider addresses this issue by moving the clusters to the cloud. The people that wrote and work on Skaffold work for Google, so the coupling is much better with Google Cloud, so that's the route we decided to take. It seems that the majority of this course so far has been all about installing new programs and building configuration files. I guess a lot of DevOps is about configuration files, though, so this does make sense. I'm sure the deeper we get into the course, the more tools we will have to automate this process a little further. That's how the course has gone to this point. We built an event bus from scratch earlier in the course, but in this project, we will be using NATS, so that's one example of the work being abstracted away. Overall, I have found that I have a lot of interest in this whole process. I know I have a lot of courses I need to take specific to the work I do on a daily basis, but I would love to learn more about Docker and Kubernetes after I finish this course. I'll have to find a way to fit it in, somehow.

Until tomorrow!