Vuyisile Ndlovu

@terrameijar.bsky.social

Cloud, DevOps and Automation

I've been freelancing for a couple of months now, and while it gives me flexibility over my time, I miss being employed and working as part of a team, having daily stand ups, going through code reviews and attending annual summits in interesting locations.

I've been deploying a lot of front end applications lately so I figured it time to look into the ecosystem deeply instead of blindly deploying. I'm currently leaning React. What are the most important concepts I need to know ?

I set up Paperless-ngx successfully in Kubernetes & uploaded documents. I'll be using it to manage receipts & important records digitally. It has many great features; automatic document classification, tagging, & full text search (even in images). Best of all? It's a Django app!

Paperless ngx homepage

I'm learning Azure & I have only $200 in Azure credit valid for a month, so I need to use it wisely. The advantage of using Terraform is that I can easily destroy all resources I create during my learning sessions, keeping costs low. As you can see from the image below, I've only used 5 cents.

Screenshot of an Azure Portal notification that reads "Subscription 'Azure subscription 1' has a remaining credit of $199.95"

My media server kept freezing and crashing Kubernetes pods. After some digging, I realised the bottleneck was the old spinning HDD. I cloned the system to an SSD, swapped the drives, and the node is now stable and fast. In this post, I talk about how I did it with minimal downtime.

From HDD to SSD: How I fixed an I/O Bottleneck in a Kubernetes Node

My media server kept freezing and crashing Kubernetes pods. After some digging, I realised the bottleneck was the old spinning HDD. I cloned the system to an SSD, swapped the drives, and the node is now stable and fast. In this post, I talk about how I did it with minimal downtime.

vuyisile.com

I'm having trouble with my Kubernetes nodes. - Server A has lots of RAM & a fast SSD, but its CPU is terrible & generates too much heat. - Server B has a good CPU, but its disk is slow, & it has little RAM. The best solution is to invest in two mini PCs with SSDs to replace the current hardware.

Putting a server on the Internet exposes you to relentless automated attacks from hackers & bots. Whenever I provision a server, the first thing I do is harden its security. This is a screenshot from a server I set up last month, it already has 200K failed login attempts

Output of fail2ban showing 200 thousand failed login attempts on the server

A server I manage crashed recently due to running out of disk space. The cause was nodejs builds eating up space in node_modules and .cache folders. I cleaned them up, moved builds to a different server & created a cron job to automatically create space by deleting unused files