I feel like this week has been a week of yak shaving .

Kubernetes

Due to salt ’s upcoming great module migration I am a little worried for the project status. Even though I am not thrilled about Kubernetes, I went through kubernetes the hard way again as an exercise to remember how the parts are connected. After finishing that, I installed minikube to experiment a bit more. I also briefly spun up a Linode Kubernetes cluster to test there, but then removed it after a day since I have no current plans to use it yet.

While I still like the goals of Kubernetes, I am not sure I am thrilled about all the moving parts and the explosion of yaml manifests to get there. I know helm charts are a thing, but they do not seem to meaningfully reduce the layers of yaml and configuration. The way Salt uses its renderers system to handle things is still a design that I really like.

Salt Extensions

Earlier in the week I spent a bit of time updating my salt extensions as proper Python packages, though I still need to wrap that up to push to PyPi. I think continued working on a salt-kafka extension that I will use to manage retention for my home lab kafka cluster.

Caddy

I also got wrapped up in some server work. I have several cloud VMs I use for hosting and dev work that are likely due for an upgrade. I was originally going to use traefik as a routing/ssl offload server, but wasn’t a fan of how file configs were managed. Moving to caddy seems like it will allow me to better manage files in salt in a more familiar include conf.d/* type layout.

Missing Memory

I am only using a small cloud VM for that server right now, so it was a bit surprising when a 1gb ram server was suddenly ~200mb of ram less. It seems like a change between kernel-core-5.14.0-570.18.1.el9_6.x86_64 and kernel-core-5.14.0-570.25.1.el9_6.x86_64 is to blame though I have not identified the core culprit.

# Pre update
[root ~]# dmesg | grep "Memory:"
[    0.012862] Memory: 260860K/1048032K available (16384K kernel code, 5766K rwdata, 13624K rodata, 4048K init, 7384K bss, 138020K reserved, 0K cma-reserved)
[root ~]# free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           957Mi       312Mi       644Mi       5.0Mi       142Mi       644Mi
Swap:          495Mi          0B       495Mi
[root ~]#

Then after running dnf upgrade

[root ~]# dmesg | grep "Memory:"
[    0.013854] Memory: 260860K/1048032K available (16384K kernel code, 5766K rwdata, 13624K rodata, 4048K init, 7384K bss, 305412K reserved, 0K cma-reserved)
[root ~]# free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           765Mi       311Mi       358Mi       3.0Mi       215Mi       453Mi
Swap:          495Mi          0B       495Mi
[root ~]#