I’ve had most of my stuff running a k3s “cluster” for the past half a year or so. The whole setup runs on a single $5-a-month Digital Ocean droplet with 1vCPU and 1GB of memory.
Needless to say, it doesn’t take much to bring the whole thing to its knees. While it has no issues dealing with the little traffic my blog receives, I would accidentally bring it down occasionally when I install a Helm chart that turned out to be much heavier than I’d thought.
Not the carrier. Not the anime. The mountain. (After which the carrier was named, by the way.) It’s not one of those jagged, snow-capped “cool” mountains. It’s a relaxed, even comfy mountain. At 1400-and-a-little meters high with gentle slopes, it’s a good day’s escape from Tokyo’s chaos.
After last year, I once again decided to take part in the Hacktoberfest fun. I have plenty of repositories lying around (sadly much less well maintained by yours truly than preferable). Of course this also means that I can gather the necessary contributions from updating dependencies in my own repositories, but I’d prefer to instead contribute to those dependencies.
Just a week after I did my three-day journey along the Jounen range, I went back to the Northern Alps for another round. This time I climbed Mt Yari. At 3180m it’s the fifth highest mountain in Japan, and second highest in the Northern Alps after Hotaka. The Yari-Hotaka ridge is something I’d like to try eventually (it’s famously challenging), but this wasn’t that time.
Living in a city for most of the time it’s always surprising just how clear the sky can be and how bright the stars can be once you’re in nature. That struck me at Mti Mkubwa too, the first camp on Kilimanjaro. “Oh, so that’s why it’s called the Milky Way!”
We started the day with a dancing-singing introduction from the porters and guides. It felt like we were at leisure of time, in no rush whatsoever. We woke up “early” of course (compared to when I’d normally wake up) but only left well past eight.
The Ocean was one of the first “djent bands” in my library, so I was really happy when I heard that they will be playing live in Tokyo. It was also my first time visiting the famous Shimo-Kitazawa area and also ages since the last time I’d been to such a small venue.
I didn’t realize there would be four (!) other bands playing too, The Ocean had all my attention. Some of them were more experimental (reminding me of Deafhaven) while others less so, but to be honest after a while they just felt long.
But the wait was worth it, as The Ocean delivered magnificently. It was also fun to see the community culture centered around the venue. Reminded me a lot of the university music club.
Once again Summer Sonic came up with a lineup that I couldn’t resist. Just look at that: Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, Maximum the Hormone, Rancid, Man with a Mission, Babymetal and even Red Hot Chili Peppers? In one day? It was nothing short of intense.
I’ve been thinking about climbing Tanzawa for a long time. It’s close to Tokyo and access is good. At the same time, depending on the route it can be exciting and long as well. The way I chose, starting from the Yabitsu pass, then going down towards Miyagase was both.
Having played around with the managed Kubernetes offerings of various cloud players (DO, AWS, GCP), I was wondering if it was possible to do this cheap. My site doesn’t have much traffic or anything complicated really, so running it off a $5 DO droplet is reasonable. Sadly managed Kubernetes offerings won’t come out so cheap. (Sure I could leech off the starting $300 GCP credit for a year then keep hopping accounts, but…)
Then I read about k3s. The people behind Rancher made it as a lightweight (but functionally complete) Kubernetes distro. Lightweight, they say… Just how light? (Imagine a weird maniac light in my eyes here.) Could I run it on a $5 droplet?
I think many people of my profession got recommended a certain article by Medium in their weekly digest. The launch-introduction post by Garden got my attention too. I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with developing on Kubernetes, so every drop of information in that regard is much welcome.
