Navigating the Pitfalls: Lessons Learned from Implementing Kubernetes in a Small SaaS Business

Website analytics + Uptime Monitor + Server Status = Tianji

All in one project!

A lightweight server resource monitoring hub with historical data, docker stats, and alerts.

Sidekick is made to make your life easy as you deploy your applications. It’s meant for people who care about shipping as fast as possible while doing things the right way. Sidekick is designed to allow you to host multiple applications on a single VPS and take care of making them production ready. If you get enough traction, scale up your VPS and call it a day!

Astuto is an open source customer feedback tool. It helps you collect, manage and prioritize feedback from your customers, so you can build a better product.

Fider is a feedback portal for feature requests and suggestions.

Elegant open source project tracking.

Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong. Not to mention: it's a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don't sell the data, but that doesn't mean they don't use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round-trip-time of the network request makes revising your work all the more tedious.

LanguageTool is great, if you have gigabytes of RAM to spare and are willing to download the ~16GB n-gram dataset. Besides the memory requirements, I found LanguageTool too slow: it would take several seconds to lint even a moderate-size document.

That's why I created Harper: it is the grammar checker that fits my needs. Not only does it take milliseconds to lint a document, take less than 1/50th of LanguageTool's memory footprint, but it is also completely private.

Harper is even small enough to load via WebAssembly.

A web app to manage your Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) accounts and generate their security codes.

git-sync is a CLI tool designed to help you back up your Git repositories. This tool ensures you have a local copy of your repositories, safeguarding against potential issues such as account bans or data loss.

Dagu is a powerful Cron alternative that comes with a Web UI. It allows you to define dependencies between commands as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) in a declarative YAML format. Dagu simplifies the management and execution of complex workflows. It natively supports running Docker containers, making HTTP requests, and executing commands over SSH.

Effortless PostgreSQL backups with a user-friendly web interface!

Git Town provides additional Git commands that automate the creation, synchronization, shipping, and cleanup of Git branches. Compatible with all popular Git workflows like Git Flow, GitHub Flow, GitLab Flow, and trunk-based development. Supports mono-repos and stacked changes.

I spent much of last year working on Terraform Stacks, which aims to address several problems I've long wanted to solve in Terraform around describing larger systems that have multiple components spread across multiple deployment environments.

My most significant contribution was designing and implementing the new DSL for describing a Terraform stack, and that's what this article is about.

When you first start building AI applications with generative AI, you'll likely end up using OpenAI's API at some point in your project's journey. And for good reason! Their API is well-structured, fast, and supported by great libraries. At a small scale or when you’re just getting started, using OpenAI can be relatively economical. There’s also a huge amount of really great educational material out there that walks you through the process of building AI applications and understanding complex techniques using OpenAI’s API.

Scaling in Kubernetes refers to adjusting the number of pod replicas or modifying the resource allocations of pods to meet application demand, ensuring optimal performance, availability, and resource utilization in a cluster. Kubernetes supports both horizontal and vertical scaling: Horizontal scaling increases or decreases the number of pod replicas while vertical scaling adjusts the resource requests (CPU and memory) of existing pods.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use and apply the kubectl command with the scale subcommand to manually execute horizontal scaling. You’ll also see how and when to use kubectl to scale deployment to 0, which means reducing the number of running pods of an application or a workload to zero, and the limitations of this action. Additionally, you’ll learn how Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) can fill in the gaps left by the Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). Finally, we highlight StormForge’s features for efficient horizontal and vertical scaling.

With introduction of BuildKit - the improved builder backend for Docker - many new features has been added to Docker, many of which are little known. So, here's a rundown of the ones you definitely need to know about and should start using to make better use of Docker.

We faced an issue within our Kubernetes cluster wherein certain multi-threaded Golang applications, for which CPU limit has been set, are experiencing throttling before reaching their designated limits.

A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that facilitates service-to-service communications between services or microservices using a proxy.