When I first started learning Kubernetes, I had the idea that observing the network traffic between a client system using kubectl and the Kubernetes API Server would be a useful thing to do. The source of the idea is unclear; I am unsure why I thought this would be useful as a learning tool. Regardless, I continued on with learning Kubernetes and never really pursued this idea—until this week. I found it can be a useful troubleshooting technique, but I will leave it up to you to determine if it is a useful learning technique. In this post, I will show you how to observe kubectl traffic using mitmproxy.
This technique is inspired by/informed by Ahmet Alp Balkan’s similarly-named blog post from 2019. Unfortunately, I found the instructions there to be incomplete (most likely just due to the passage of time and continued evolution of the tools involved).
I used the following tools and environments in my testing:
apt.kubectl version 1.33.3 was used to communicate to a self-managed cluster Continue readingLike perhaps some readers, I am quite particular about what gets installed on my systems. I try to keep my systems as “clean” as possible, doing my best to avoid tools that have an extensive list of dependencies that must be installed and updated. Where that isn’t possible—such as with the Azure CLI, which has a massive number of Python modules that are required in order for the tool to function—I will use various isolation mechanisms. For the Azure CLI, that’s typically been a Python virtual environment. Somewhat recently, though, I had an idea to try using a container. In this post, I’ll share what worked and what did not work when trying to run the Azure CLI in a container.
First, though, a disclaimer: I am not an Azure expert, nor am I a Python expert. I know enough to get by. If I share something here that’s incorrect, please contact me and constructively show me my errors so that I can fix them.
Before I started down this path, I was sure this would be a slam dunk. I mean, this is what containers are for, right? If you do some web searches for running the Azure CLI Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #191! This is my semi-regular collection of links related to technology disciplines, including networking, security, cloud computing, storage, and programming/development. I hope that I’ve managed to curate an interesting and useful set of links for readers. Enjoy!
This is turning into a “dog bites man” story, but the forecasts for spending in the datacenter for this year keep going up and up, and a few days ago Gartner’s economists and prognosticators finished up their tea and looked at the leaves at the common of a cup through a polished crystal ball and predicted that datacenter spending this year would go up. …
Datacenter Spending Forecast Revised Upwards – Yet Again was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #190! This is the first Tech Short Take of 2026, and it has been nearly three months (wow!) since the last one. I can’t argue that I fell off the blogging bandwagon over the end of 2025 and early 2026. I won’t get into all the reasons why (if you’re interested then feel free to reach out and I’ll fill you in). Enough about me—let’s get to the technical content! Here’s hoping you find something useful.
Everyone is jumpy about how much capital expenses Microsoft has on the books in 2025 and what it expects to spend on datacenters and their hardware in 2026. …
Microsoft Is More Dependent On OpenAI Than The Converse was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If you need to work with BGP in your AWS VPCs—so that BGP-learned routes can be injected into a VPC route table—then you will likely need a VPC Route Server. While you could set up a VPC Route Server manually, what’s the fun in that? In this post, I will walk you through a Pulumi program that will set up a VPC Route Server. Afterward, I will discuss some ways you could check the functionality of the VPC Route Server to show that it is indeed working as expected.
To make things as easy as possible, I have added a simple Pulumi program to my GitHub “learning-tools” repository in the aws/vpc-route-server directory. This program sets up a VPC Route Server and its associated components for you, and I will walk through this program in this blog post.
The first step is creating the VPC Route Server itself. The VPC Route Server has no prerequisities, and the primary configuration needed is setting the ASN (Autonomous System Number) the Route Server should use:
rs, err := vpc.NewRouteServer(ctx, "rs", &vpc.RouteServerArgs{
AmazonSideAsn: pulumi.Int(65534),
Tags: pulumi.StringMap{
"Name": Continue readingWelcome to Technology Short Take #189, Halloween Edition! OK, you caught me—this Tech Short Take is not scary. I’ll try harder next year. In the meantime, enjoy this collection of links about data center-related technologies. Although this installation is lighter on content than I would prefer, I am publishing anyway in the hopes of trying to get back to a somewhat-regular cadence. Here’s hoping you find something useful and informative!
Every now and then, I publish one of these “Posts from the Past” articles that looks back on content I’ve created and posted over the life of this site. This year marks 20 years of content—I can hardly believe it! Don’t worry, though; you won’t have to go through 20 years of past posts. Here is a selection of posts from mid- to late October over the last decade or so. I hope you find something useful, informative, or at least entertaining!
Last year I shared information on how to use Pulumi to stand up an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster with Bottlerocket OS on the Kubernetes nodes—without using any higher-level Pulumi components.
In 2022, after getting irritated with what I felt was a poor user experience when accessing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters created with Pulumi, I published this post on how to change the Kubeconfig file for a more streamlined user experience.
Cluster API is the name of the game for multiple posts in October 2021. First I wrote this article on kustomize transformer configurations for Cluster API v1beta1 (so that you can use kustomize to manipulate Cluster API manifests), Continue reading
A while ago I wrote an article about linting Markdown files with markdownlint. In that article, I presented the use case of linting the Markdown source files for this site. While manually running linting checks is fine—there are times and situations when this is appropriate and necessary—this is the sort of task that is ideally suited for a Git pre-commit hook. In this post, I’ll discuss Git pre-commit hooks in the context of using them to run linting checks.
Before moving on, a disclaimer: I am not an expert on Git hooks. This post shares my limited experience and provides an example based on what I use for this site. I have no doubt that my current implementation will improve over time as my knowledge and experience grow.
As this page explains, a hook is a program “you can place in a hooks directory to trigger actions at certain points in git’s execution.” Generally, a hook is a script of some sort. Git supports different hooks that get invoked in response to specific actions in Git; in this particular instance, I’m focusing on the pre-commit hook. This hook gets invoked by git-commit (i.e. Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #188! I’m back once again with a small collection of articles and links related to a variety of data center-related technologies. I hope you find something useful!
npm packages.A little over two years ago, I wrote a post on creating a Talos Linux cluster on AWS using Pulumi. At the time of that post, the Pulumi provider for Talos was still a prerelease version. Since then, the Talos provider has undergone some notable changes necessitating an update to the example code I have on GitHub. For your reading pleasure, therefore, I present you with the 2025 edition of a tutorial for using Pulumi to create a Talos Linux cluster on AWS.
The updated Pulumi code can be found in this GitHub repository. Note that I’ve tagged the original version from the 2023 blog post with the “2023-post” tag, in the event you’d like to see the original code. While I chose to write my Pulumi code in Go, note that Pulumi supports a number of different languages (such as JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, one of the .NET languages, Java, or even YAML). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to re-implement this functionality in a different language. This Pulumi program is based on the Talos documentation for standing up a cluster on AWS.
The Pulumi program has four major sections:
Welcome to Technology Short Take #187! In this Technology Short Take, I have a curated collection of links on topics ranging from BGP to blade server hardware to writing notes using a “zettelkasten”-style approach, along with a few other topics thrown in here and there for fun. I hope you find something useful!
curl fame) explains why the curl project doesn’t use CVSS scores and describes some of the problems that result from this decision.Both the global economy and spending on information technology are so vast that it is hard to really grasp the numbers sometimes. …
How To Cash In On Massive Datacenter Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #186! Yes, it’s been quite a while since I published a Technology Short Take; life has “gotten in the way,” so to speak, of gathering links to share with all of you. However, I think this crazy phase of my life is about to start settling down (I hope so, anyway), and I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to pick up the blogging pace once again. For now, though, here’s a collection of links I’ve gathered since the last Technology Short Take. I hope you find something useful here!
Recently I needed to be able to stand up a dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) Kubernetes cluster on Flatcar Container Linux using kubeadm. At first glance, this seemed like it would be relatively straightforward, but as I dug deeper into it there were a few quirks that emerged. Given these quirks, it seemed like a worthwhile process to write up and publish here. In this post, you’ll see how to use Butane and kubeadm to bootstrap a dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 Kubernetes cluster on AWS.
For those who are unfamiliar, Flatcar Container Linux is a container-optimized Linux distribution considered to be the spiritual successor to CoreOS. For configuring OS instances during provisioning, Flatcar uses Ignition (see here or here for more information). Ignition is intended to be machine-friendly, but not human-friendly. Users can use Butane to write human-friendly YAML configurations that then get transpiled into Ignition. So, when bootstrapping Kubernetes on Flatcar, users will generally use a Butane configuration that leverages kubeadm, as described in the Flatcar documentation.
While the Butane configurations in the documentation are a good start for bootstrapping Kubernetes on Flatcar, they don’t address the dual-stack use case. As outlined in the Kubernetes documentation for dual-stack support with kubeadm, you Continue reading
Two weeks ago, before we began our nightmare travels to get to the 2025 edition of the GOU Technology Conference in San Jose, we put together an analysis of the AI server and storage spending forecasts put out by the good folks at IDC. …
A Second Opinion On Future GenAI Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #185, the first of 2025! I’m excited for the opportunity to continue to bring readers articles and links of interest across data center- and cloud-related technologies (along with some original content along the way). I had originally intended for this post to be my last post of 2024, but personal challenges got in the way. Enough of that, though—on to the content!
For a while now, I’ve been using Direnv to manage environment variables when I enter or leave certain directories. Since I have to work with more than one AWS account, one of the use cases for me has been populating AWS-specific environment variables, like AWS_REGION or AWS_PROFILE. This generally works really well for me, but recently I ran into a bit of a corner case involving multiple AWS regions, Pulumi, and using S3 as the Pulumi backend. In this post, I’ll share the workaround that allows this configuration to work as expected.
I describe this as a “bit of a corner case” because it only affects specific configurations (which included my configuration):
AWS_REGION environment variable and not setting the aws:region configuration value used by the Pulumi AWS provider.s3://bucket-name.In my specific situation, my backend state bucket resides in the AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) region, as this offers the lowest latencies from my home office in Colorado. Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take #184! This Tech Short Take is a bit shorter than the usual ones, but then again this week—at least in the US—is a bit shorter than most weeks due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Even so, I hope that I’ve managed to include some information that folks find useful. Also, thanks to some feedback from readers, I’ve tried hard to ensure that links are more descriptive and informative than they’ve sometimes been in the past; let me know how I did. Now, on to the content!