Kubernetes Java Client

If you are getting started with Kubernetes, you probably have been using kubectl to perform operations on your cluster. Kubectl is a client library that communicates with the Kubernetes cluster using the Kubernetes API.

In this article we are going to learn how to use the Kubernetes Java Client to communicate with our cluster from a Java program.

Installation

We can find the up-to-date instructions at the official installation documentation.

For Bazel, we need to have the maven repository configured in the workspace and the client-java artifact:

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Resource Management in Kubernetes - Requests and Limits

This article assumes some basic knowledge of Kubernetes. If you need an introduction to Kubernetes you can look at:

Why do we need to know about requests and limit

If we tried to run a pod that requires 8GB of memory in a host that only has 4GB of memory, the host would run out of memory and it would crash. In this article we are going to learn how to specify how much resources a pod needs so the scheduler can make better decisions about where to run pods.

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Kubernetes ConfigMaps

It’s common for applications to require some kind of configuration. These configurations make it easy to change settings depending on the environment where the application is running.

For example, we might want to connect to a back-end server when running in a testing environment, but to a different one when running in production. An application might read these settings from environment variables, configuration files, or other means.

ConfigMaps are a way to make configurations available to pods so they can be used by our applications.

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Command Line Efficiency With Tmux

I’m a a Software Developer that uses Ubuntu as his main OS and Vim as his main editor. I like Ubuntu (more specifically Gnome) because it allows me to move windows around without having to use the mouse. If I need to maximize a window, move a window to a different screen or split the screen between two windows, I just need to type a keyboard shortcut.

When I’m focused on writing or reading code, Vim also allows me to move around the code easily without a mouse.

Tmux is a tool that allows us to expand the capabilities of the terminal so we can manipulate terminal panes similar to how we can manipulate windows with Gnome, or navigate code in a similar fashion as with Vim.

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Verifying Github commits with GPG

At the time of this writing, Github is the most popular place to host open source projects on the internet. It has a lot of features that make it easy to collaborate, navigate the code, test, deploy, etc.

Since it’s so popular, it’s important to understand a little about how security works on Github.

Security

When we create a new repository on Github we are the only ones who are allowed to write to that repository.

If we want to allow other people to write to a repository we can add them as a collaborator. Collaborators have a lot of power, so they should be people we know well and trust.

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Dependency injection (Inversion of Control) in Spring framework

In this article we are going to learn about one of the foundational pieces of the Spring Framework; its implementation of Dependency Injection (which they usually refer by the more confusing name: Inversion of Control or IoC).

If you don’t know what Dependency Injection is, you can start by reading the first section of my Dependency Injection with Dagger and Bazel article. That section explains what is dependency injection and how it’s typically used.

Spring Beans

The term bean is used to refer to a few things in the Java world, so it’s important to know what it means when used in the context of Spring.

A Spring bean refers to an object that is injected by Spring’s depedency injection framework (Usually referred as IoC framework or IoC container).

ApplicationContext

The ApplicationContext interface takes care of creation and injection of beans. There are different implementations of this interface that allow us to configure our beans using different methods. We’ll start by looking at the traditional way: ClassPathXmlApplicationContext.

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Kubernetes networking with Istio

A few months ago I wrote an Introduction to Kubernetes. In that article I created a service to achive communication between containers. This service acts as a load balancer that redirects requests to pods that are part of a deployment. We communicate with this load balancer via an IP that is assigned to it.

A service that needs to communicate with another service can query Kubernetes to discover the IP address for the load balancer and use that IP address for communication. This is does the job, but there are some things that are not possible with this configuration that we get from Istio.

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Flyway - Version control for Databases in Java

Database migrations

Database migrations (or Schema migrations) are the technique used to keep track of changes in the schema of a database. There are many tools for handling database migrations for different languages and frameworks; They typically provide these features:

  • Represent schema changes in code (so they can be added to source control)
  • Keep track of the last migration applied
  • Apply only the necessary migrations

Having all the schema changes in code also makes it easy to ensure all environments are running exactly the same DB schema.

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Concurrency in computer systems

In this article we are going to learn what is concurrency in computer systems. To understand it better, we’ll see what are the problems that occur when there is concurrency and what are some ways to prevent those problems.

What is concurrency?

Concurrency referes to the ability of a computer system to do different things at the same time.

We see concurrency in action in our computers when there are multiple programs executing at the same time. We can be playing some music in our computer and at the same time browsing the internet, for example.

At a high level, there are two ways of doing concurrency:

  • Time slicing
  • Parallel execution

For hardware that supports parallel execution, time slicing can be done on top of it.

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