What I’m trying to achieve ?
If you have some ideas for project, cooperation etc... drop me an email to vladoportos@gmail.com 📧
2025 rpi4 and 5 Kubernetes Cluster update 😃
My personal goal is to have a FaaS environment at home. Building it from scratch would help me to understand Kubernetes cluster solutions for future reference. Another advantage of building it from the bottom up is that, if something breaks, you will at least have some idea about what might be wrong.
Note that in doing so you will in essence become:
- Storage support
- Networking support
- OS support
- Application support
- Security support
- Hands & Eyes
- Architecture designer in one person.
And, since navigating the waters of Cloud Native Landscape is so easy (Yeah, you can feel the sarcasm, can't you), I made this guide.
For funzies, look at the current state of Cloud Native Landscape
What did I build ?
- Deployed 8 node Kubernetes cluster on arm64
- Deployed distributed block storage on Kubernetes - Longhorn
- Deployed OpenFaaS - Function as a Service platform
- Deployed example OpenFaaS function
- Deployed Portainer - Dashboard for Kubernetes
- Deployed monitoring - Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Promtail
This gives me a nice solution to deploy functions, to learn more about Serverless Applications, and try a new way of building applications. I do worry that function as a service might introduce lag, but on other hand I can invoke functions asynchronously, and consume the results when they come, while the main program continues. Kind of like external multitasking. It is certainly helpful for load balancing, or even scaling to 0 (Only supported by OpenFaaS paid version), which is super nice. It requires me to think a bit differently (more complexly, in my opinion) about building applications compared to standard monolith programming.
Affiliate Links
I want to keep this page adds free as much as possible, I can't stand pop ups, and ads in general. On other hands I can recommend few services that I can stand behind and give you a little something, get me a little something at no additional cost to you and me... should be win win 😀
Hetzner
I love this guys because they are cheap! Ok ok, not only that, they provide very good and stable service... but they do not sponsor me or anything. I'm just using their VPS for business ( other unrelated project ) and also this site is running on their physical server... you can get nice VPS with far more RAM than others for far better price, and no hidden charges (I'm looking at you google and aws! )
If you use my link: https://hetzner.cloud/?ref=JN91dmVzdkN4 you get 20$ credit... so why not right? I mean you wont get probably physical server for that ( I pay 47Eur for very nice 12Core, 64GB ram sever, which is a steal)... but VPS with 8G ram and 4CPU for 13.10Euro a month, is nice deal as well...
Windsurf
You know, Gthubs Copilot ? Well, this is just a whole modded VS Code editor with built-in AI support for most major LLMs. Let's be hones for coding, Claude is the best anyway, and it is built in ! You can use my referral, and you get 500 bonus flex credits. https://codeium.com/refer?referral_code=b6caa7560a
Just to be clear I think their current cheap "Pro" plan does not have enough credits for serious work and I went hard with it, I made so many smaller and bigger projects with Windsurf and hit the limit within week and half... switched to "Pro Ultimate" and even hit that limit in last week of the month. I love it though 😄
NordVPN
A staple in affiliate links 🤣 but it is a service I can get behind, since I use their VPN services for years now, mostly for projects that needs to scrape stuff off the internet, I think they have the most VPN servers. I loaded them into PostgreSQL and my API is using them from there... I might make some article about that funny side project. Again, I'm not sponsored or anything, but if you want VPN for good price you might give it a try with my affiliate link. You get nice discount too. They have discounts all the time though.