Kiro is AWS’s agentic coding tool, available both as an IDE and a CLI. I’ve been using the CLI a lot lately, including for AWS work where I let it run aws commands on my behalf. It works well. But the moment you point it at a real AWS account from a laptop that already has prod credentials configured locally, there’s a gap nobody talks about. You probably have a dozen profiles in…
Kiro hooks are actions that trigger at specific points in the agent’s lifecycle: before or after a tool call, when a file is saved, when the agent stops, or when you manually fire them. A hook can either run a shell command or send a prompt back to the agent. They’re how you get the agent to actually follow your team’s rules, not just write code that compiles. When Kiro writes…
Karpenter is an open-source Kubernetes node autoscaler created by AWS, designed to improve efficiency and cost savings by provisioning and de-provisioning nodes dynamically based on workloads. I have been using karpenter since its first few versions when it was quite limited in features but after the v1.0 release I believe it has become the major player in this field. This article is intended for…
Kubernetes apps often require a number of supporting resources like databases, message queues, and object stores. AWS provides a set of managed services that we can use to provide these resources for our apps, but provisioning and integrating them with Kubernetes is usually complex and time-consuming. Traditionally what I have done in the past, I used Terraform for this, but this was disconnected…
In this article, I’m going to show you how you can migrate an existing EKS cluster to Graviton2 workers in a few simple steps. I’m going to assume you already have an existing EKS cluster working on an Intel based infrastructure (Intel and/or AMD instance types). Step 1: add Graviton2 worker nodes in your cluster. This depends on how your EKS cluster is configured; you could have one…
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service ( EKS ) provides a managed Kubernetes service, allowing users to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications using Kubernetes on AWS. With the introduction of Graviton2 processors, AWS offers enhanced performance and cost savings. Karpenter is an open-source node lifecycle management project built for Kubernetes that was created by AWS as an alternative…
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers managed Amazon Elasticsearch clusters (or OpenSearch as they call their fork of the open source Elasticsearch) for deploying and managing search applications. Lately, I’ve been managing several self-managed clusters and showed how I’ve migrated those to graviton2 ; for newer clusters, I’ve started exploring the AWS managed solution for…
Elasticsearch is an open-source search engine that enables you to store, search, and analyze big data in real time. It is a distributed and scalable search engine that can be used to index and search large volumes of data across multiple nodes. I’m currently managing several Elasticsearch clusters running on AWS EC2 instances. AWS offers EC2 instances powered by Graviton2 processors (their…
Depending on the size of the databases you have in mysql innodb the time it takes mysql to restart can be horribly slow (for very big innodb databases). There are some tricks that can speed this up, but the most effective one that I’ve found and use all the time in similar situations is to pre-flush the dirty pages right before shutdown; this can be done like this: mysql> set global…
Chef 11 was released earlier in February and it is awesome! Like most people, I love the new features like partial search, chef-apply and knife-essentials inclusions, awesome formatted output, etc. Of course the open source chef 11 server was rewritten completely in erlang with postgresql/mysql support replacing the ruby/couchdb backend stack. solr and rabbitmq are still there ;)… There are many…
While working on migrating a chef server from 0.10.x to version 11, I ended up extending the BackupExport and BackupRestore plugins written by Steven Danna and Joshua Timberman and added support for cookbooks and clients . Currently knife-backup has support for the following objects: clients nodes roles environments data bags cookbooks and all their versions. knife-backup will backup all cookbook…
I’m working on many projects where we have a process that will make sure that every change we introduce in the cookbooks enters as a new version and where we use extensively environments to select what versions of cookbooks we want to use in each environment. This sounds like a great idea, and a workflow that I would highly recommend to anyone for sure. Still, after a while, the result is…
It’s been a little more than a year since I stepped up and became one of the organizers of the Bay Area Chef user group , trying to help my good friend Rob Berger as he was getting swamped with work and could not dedicate as much time to this, as he used to in the past. This post is meant to be a quick review on what happened during this time, what worked well and of course some ideas on how…
For a while now, I wanted to migrate my blog from Wordpress to Octopress , but for some reason I kept putting it on the shelf and not doing it. (let’s say because of all those client related projects…). Finally last weekend I’ve completed the migration and I’m really excited to get back to blogging after this. This post is meant to capture some of the issues I’ve…
After completing the migration of my blog from Wordpress to Octopress I had the surprise that Disqus comments were not showing up on the site . I’ve already migrated in advance to Disqus and the Wordpress blog was working just fine with the new format. However, once switched to Octopress there were no comments active on the site . Strangely, the total number of comments for each post on the…
This week Opscode hosted its inaugural user conference here in San Francisco, and it was an awesome event enjoyed by all chef fans. Even if this was the first one (they are already planing for the future ones), this was by no means a small event, with more than 400 people attending and the workshops that ran on Tuesday sold out . Even if I have not attended any workshop (they had 2 flavors, one…
I just started working on a new project and as you would expect one of the first things I did was to download its git repository from github . These were just some scripts and should have been very small ~5M, but the clone from gitbhub took about one hour as the full repo folder was 1.5G… (with the biggest size under .git/objects/pack ) Crazy… What was in the git repository history that would…
I’m packing for Boston and will be there next week for LISA11 . This will be my second year as part of the LISA blogging team , and after how much I enjoyed LISA last year in San Jose I wouldn’t miss this one even if it is on the other side of the country. I’ve tried to finish as much work as possible to be able to focus on the conference ;) but for various reasons of course this…
One of the advantages of being a member of the LISA11 Blog Team is that I was able to talk and interview this year program co-chairs: Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes . This was a great honor for me especially since I’ve been a big fan of Tom’s work for many years. The full article is available on the USENIX blog: “ Tom Limoncelli and Doug Hughes Interview ” Also my…
Building packages is a task that every system administrator will end up doing. Most of the time this is not a very interesting task but someone has to do it, right? Normally you will end up modifying and tweaking based on your own needs an existing package that was built by the maintainers of the Linux distribution that you are using. In time you might even become familiar with the packaging…