In this post we’re going to take a quick look at how to run Rancher in a Kubernetes cluster locally on macOS for development and testing purposes. There are several different ways to run Kubernetes for local development. In this guide I’m going to focus on just one way: K3D.

K3D is a lightweight wrapper to run Rancher Labs’ K3s in Docker. K3s is a certified Kubernetes distribution for edge and IoT applications with a small resource footprint and ARMv7 support. Like KiND, K3D uses a container runtime as opposed to a virtual machine — saving precious resources. Unlike KiND, K3D supports the ARM architecture and requires about 16x less RAM.

When you’re finished you’ll have a functional K3s Kubernetes cluster running on your Mac with Rancher UI for cluster management. This guide assumes you’ve never run Kubernetes before and, therefore, also serves as a practical starting point, though I won’t be going into detail about the nuts and bolts of Kubernetes.

After switching from macOS to Manjaro on my MacBook Pro I was in need of a truly encrypted back-up solution. After considering a host of backup tools, including Restic, I opted for a less mainstream tool which supports blake2 encryption, gives you your private key, and, as an added bonus, churns out the smallest backups possible for use in cloud storage scenarios: BorgBackup.

In this post I’ll cover how to migrate encrypted Borg backups from any system which can run MinIO to a cloud services provider offering 500GB object storage for less than 6€ per month: Scaleway – a service brought to my attention by a friend and fellow After Dark user named Teo.

Read on to learn how to create Borg backups with MinIO and Scaleway.

Rio is a MicroPaaS for Kubernetes designed to run using minimal resources. Rio provides automatic DNS and HTTPS, load balancing, routing, metrics and more. Use it to remove the chore of creating and managing a secure IT infrastructure.

k3s is a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution capable of running on constrained hardware and therefore ideal for local, edge and IoT substrates. K3s was originally developed for Rio but useful enough to stand on its own.

Today I’m going to show you how to easily set-up k3s and Rio on Manjaro Linux MacBook and use them to create a self-hosted, git-based continuous delivery pipeline to serve your own website.

If you’re not yet familiar with Kubernetes, no problem. Please let this gentle introduction serve as your practical guide. When you’re finished you’ll have a better understanding of the concepts and tools used in container orchestration and a shiny new website you can use to demonstrate your skills.

Lately I’ve been learning more about cloud architecture and related tooling. Stuff like Lambda, Serverless, AWS CLI and – now that it’s a part of Docker Machine – container orchestration with Docker Swarm clusters.

As an AWS user I’m particularly geeked about the Docker Private Beta, which makes it possible to experiment with Swarm using Amazon Web Services. But rather than waiting for a private beta we’re going to experiment with Docker Swarm using one of my favorite prototyping tools apart from the RPi: Digital Ocean.