Goals + Recap

  • Figured out what I wanted to do with my AWS+Kubernetes project.
  • Will follow along with a Manning live project and write about it.
    It’s called Deploy Services Using Kubernetes.
  • Some of it will be reflection and reproduction. Did I do what I did in November and December purely stumbling along? Or do I know what I did? Will I be able to write about it coherently? This project should help.
  • And the big new piece is hopefully learning about doing a “real-world”-ish project on AWS.
  • Not that what I did was not real world. I do use all my services in real life and the cluster has solved so many issues for me, but what I do, I think is a bit novel and not the norm. So the Manning project is something for folks to recognise and relate to.
  • From their description:

FGTO is almost ready to deploy their Kubernetes application—they just need you to help them create a Kubernetes cluster for their production environment.
The simplest and most reliable way to do this is to use a managed Kubernetes service, and for this liveProject, you’ll use AWS EKS. You’ll work with various tools, including Terraform and Crossplane, to create and configure the cluster. Terraform helps you configure your cluster with just a small amount of code, while Crossplane ensures you can provision the service and its infrastructure using only Kubernetes manifests. Once the application is deployed, you’ll work to encrypt secrets in Git using SOPS and AWS KMS and promote changes from development to production on EKS.
When you’re done, FGTO will have a complete working Kubernetes deployment!

  • This quarter, my focus will be on:
    1. Walking
    2. Doing the project above.
    3. Writing about my experiences with Kubernetes.
    4. Reducing client work a bit. Prep for a project in March.
    5. Continue with NMC work.

2026-01-06 09:50

  • Late start. Was hungry so had some breakfast.
  • 2026-01-06 09:55: Off to mail some letters. Be back in a while.

2026-01-06 14:00

  • Took a while. But I think, I’ll do an hour or so of work now
  • First hiccough, my version of Java is too new for the project’s version of gradle. So with the help of Gemini:
    change the distribution to use in gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties to distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-8.6-all.zip
  • Still errors. Think I am going to just create a VM and install everything the way the project wants me to.
  • 2026-01-06 15:02: VM’s up. Now to install project dependancies.
  • 2026-01-06 15:41: Done with the installs.
  • 2026-01-06 17:07: And now I run into a different error. Thi live project seems to be too old and not updated. The newer versions of Docker don’t seem to like talking to whatever it is, that is calling it from the app.
  • 2026-01-06 17:12: Ok, known issue. So I did like they said, created a .docker-javo.properties file in my home folder and explicitly set api.version=1.44. Test seems to be running now. Found it thanks to another live project member who went before me!1
  • 2026-01-06 17:54: Calling it a day.

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  1. Thank you Kries! ↩︎