At Cloudant, we use GitOps to manage our Kubernetes workloads. One of the advantages of this approach is that we store fully-rendered Kubernetes manifests within GitHub for deployment to our Kubernetes clusters.

One thing that I often find myself doing is writing small one-off tools to answer questions about those manifests. For example, “by deployment, what is the CPU and memory resource allocation, and how much does that cost in terms of worker machine price?”. As a first approximation, this can be discovered by loading up all Deployment manifests from our GitOps repository, then processing their content to discover container resource requests and the number of replicas specified by each Deployment.

For a long time, I’ve kind of existed with a barely-there understanding of Python packaging. Just enough to copy a requirements.txt file from an old project and write a Makefile with pip install -r requirements.txt. A few years ago, I started using pipenv, and again learned just-enough to make it work.

It’s relatively easy to find articles online about the basics of Kubernetes that talk about how Kubernetes looks on your servers. That a Kubernetes cluster consists of master nodes (where Kubernetes book-keeping takes place) and worker nodes (where your applications and some system applications run). And that to run more stuff, you provision more workers, and that each pod looks like its own machine. And so on.

But for me, I found a disconnect between that mental image of relatively clean looking things running on servers and the reams and reams of YAML one must write to seemingly do anything with Kubernetes. Recently, I found the Kubernetes API overview pages. Somehow I’d not really internalised before that the reams of YAML are just compositions of types, like programming in any class-based language.

When we talk about Kubernetes, we should really be talking about the fact that when you, as an administrator, interact with Kubernetes using kubectl, you are using kubectl to manipulate the state of data within Kubernetes via Kubernetes’s API.

But when you use kubectl, the way you tend to tell kubectl what to do with the Kubernetes API is using YAML. A lot of freakin’ YAML. So while I hope to write more about the actual Kubernetes API sometime soon, first we’ll have talk a bit about YAML; just enough to get going. Being frank, I don’t get on well with YAML. I do get on with JSON, because in JSON there is a single way to write anything. While you don’t even get to choose between double and single quotes for your strings in JSON, I overheard a colleague say that there are over sixty ways to write a string in YAML. Sixty ways to write a string! I think they were being serious.

I’ve been using a pair of AirPods Pro for just under a week now. I use headphones in three main environments, and up until now have used three separate pairs, each of which works best for that environment. As they combine true-wireless comfort, noise-cancelling, a high promise transparency mode and closed-backs, I wondered whether the AirPods Pro could possibly replace at least a couple of my existing sets. Here we go.