Situation

Part 1 Ended With Two Unresolved Questions: A 250Mi Memory Target For A Dashboard Container Actually Using Only 24Mi, Sitting Suspiciously Close To The 256Mi Limit Already On The Deployment, With No Citable Reason Why. And A CPU Number That Had Never Once Caught My Attention, The One I’d Waved Through Without Checking. The Plan Was To Let It Accumulate History And Come Back To See Which Way The Memory Target Went. A Month Later It Went A Third Way I Hadn’t Considered, The Answer Had Nothing To Do With The Limit, And It Closed Both Questions At Once.

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Situation

Had Already Set Up VPA On A GKE Workload (A ClickHouse Backend, After It OOM’d Twice) And Assumed — Wrongly — That Vertical Pod Autoscaler Was Something GKE Provided As A Managed Feature. Turns Out The “Enable” Button On GKE Is Just Google’s Wrapper Around The Same Open-Source kubernetes/autoscaler Project Anyone Can Install Anywhere. Wanted To Confirm That For Real, So I Put It On A 6-Node Homelab RKE2 Cluster With No Cloud Provider In Sight.

It Went In Clean. What Wasn’t Clean Was The First Recommendation It Handed Back For A Live Workload — Ten Times The Container’s Actual Memory Usage, Within Minutes Of Being Installed.

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Situation

Had Been Watching A LinkedIn Account Post AWS Updates Every Week For A While — Always Just Updates, And Kept Wondering If There Was A More Human Way To Deliver Them. So, Riding The AI Wave, Built A Lambda + Bedrock + SES + S3 Pipeline: Every Friday It Pulls The AWS What’s New And Blog RSS Feeds, Hands Them To Amazon Nova Pro To Write A Categorized Digest, Emails It Out, Archives A Copy To S3 — And Also Has Claude Opus Look At This Account’s Actual Resource Usage And Suggest Optimizations.

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Situation

Needed To Wire All Of Akamai’s Data Into An Existing Grafana On GKE. Split Into Two Dashboards: CDN Data Rode On A Plugin That Was Already There, And WAF/Bot Logs Went Through A Small Proxy I Wrote Myself, Because The Only Grafana Plugin That Speaks Akamai’s SIEM API Is A Paid Third-Party One. Didn’t Want To Pay For It. (Cheapskate.)

Both pieces hit the same kind of bug: something that looks fixed, deploys clean, and still doesn’t work — with nothing useful in the logs to explain why.

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Situation

After I got Keycloak wired up, logging into the dashboard started getting stuck. No error, no crash log. Just one of those situations where you feel like you’re missing something obvious and can’t see it. Today I tried again, and this time there was a clear error in the log: Invalid parameter: redirect_uri

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Situation

A Recent Task Was To Convert An Existing External Environment On GCP Into An Internal One. The Whole Setup Runs On GKE With Gateway API Handling Load Balancing. The Assumption Going In Was That A Google-Managed Certificate Would Attach To The Gateway API Internal LB The Same Way It Already Worked On The Gateway API External LB. That Assumption Ran Into Trouble Immediately.

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Situation

My Home Lab Originally Only Used LLDAP For User Authentication, But Since The Systems I Wanted To Integrate Later Only Spoke OIDC, I Put Keycloak In Front Of It As A Bridge, With Everything Else Talking To Keycloak Instead. Wiring That Up And Testing It Turned Up Something Interesting: Got The LDAP Federation Wired Up, Got The OIDC Client Configured, Got Kubernetes Itself Trusting The Issuer. Then, Testing Whether Any Of It Actually Enforced Anything, I Ran One kubectl Command With A Made-Up Token String, And Got Back A Full Pod List. For About Thirty Seconds I Was Convinced I’d Found A Cluster-Wide Auth Bypass.

I Hadn’t. The Bug Was In My Test, Not My Cluster.

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