After what I have done in the previous post, the next step is to start building our infrastructure. For that, I will be using a few tools, namely: building a Kubernetes cluster, harnessing the power of k3s and kustomize, both of which greatly simplify the creation and configuration of the cluster and the different environments; and Argo CD as our continuous delivery tool that’s k8s native. All of this, of course, will be greatly enhanced by our already existing Git forge, and all the configuration files used are made available on the gitops-demo-config repository - this wouldn’t be a GitOps pipeline otherwise.

This is going to be a series of posts about a learning journey on what it takes to build a GitOps pipeline, with the added constraint that I’m going to be self-hosting all of the necessary parts to achieve this. On one hand, it’s bound to be a great exercise to put together disjointed pieces of knowledge I already had; and on the other, it serves as a way to document the journey for people that might be interested in knowing how such a thing is possible.

Perhaps one of the most pressing issues of our days is the (lack of) control we have over our online presence. Being spied on became the default expectation, and the lengths that this has gone to is sometimes hard to believe. Even a few months ago, it was revealed that a novel tracking method had been discovered in Meta’s Android application (Facebook and Instagram), as well as Yandex’s, were exploiting the loopback interface to be able to track your habits - looks like there’s no boundaries, physical or moral, that these companies won’t overstep. I’m focusing on this particular incident not only because it’s relatively recent, but also because it goes to show that this is a veritable whack-a-mole game; we were supposed to have dealt with the correlation between web browsing and app activity, but the tech giants found yet another way to go around it.

In the aftermath of the AWS outage, there’s a lot of talk about how the Internet has been taken hostage by this specific provider, and how the internet is not decentralized anymore. While it doesn’t seem like this is necessarily wrong - after all, the recent outage, and all AWS outages for that matter, seem to take down a sizeable portion of the internet - it’s both misguided and ignores the deeper problems at play here.

There’s a feeling you have when you just uncover a fact so shocking, and yet so obvious, that’s hard to put into words. That’s what I felt when I saw this wonderful statistic: as far as I can tell, the only category of products that had a deflationary rate, averaging -7% a year for the past 20 years, was “Information Technology, Hardware And Services”. I had already read about this trend back in my days as an undergrad in Economics (15 years ago at this point), but to be confronted about the stark reality of these numbers ends up being a punch to the gut, and candy to my brain.