SoftwareStable Blog

Thoughts and articles from SoftwareStable.

Local Development using Istio on Kind

This document outlines the setup for a local developer environment running a Kind (Kubernetes in Docker) cluster with Istio installed. Overview The environment is managed by a single script, manage-cluster.sh, which automates the creation, configuration, and teardown of the entire stack. This setup is ideal for testing and developing with Istio service mesh on a local machine. The script handles the following: Kind Cluster Creation: Sets up a multi-node Kubernetes cluster.

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Local Knative Development on macOS

Local Knative Development on macOS (Apple Silicon/ARM64) This article provides a complete guide and all the necessary scripts to set up a local Knative development environment on an Apple Silicon (ARM64) Mac. It uses Rancher Desktop, Minikube, and a custom Go application to demonstrate a real-world CloudEvents workflow. Source available from github.com. The core of this setup is a robust shell script that automates the creation and destruction of a fully configured Knative cluster.

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Doomscrollin coding

Recently, I’ve been testing out GenAI as a code assistance tool. The premise/hypothesis is that the tool will amplify an engineer’s output and thus lead to greater efficiencies. These efficiencies will manifest as either more output from existing developers or fewer developers required to achieve the same task, thus increasing productivity. As every casual economics amateur knows, the main way to increase workers’ productivity is by giving them more and better machines to work with.

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Crossplane AWS S3 Provisioner Demo

This project demonstrates how to provision and manage AWS resources (specifically an S3 bucket) from a local Kubernetes cluster using Crossplane. The entire workflow is automated via a single shell script (provisioner.sh) that sets up a local Kubernetes kind cluster, installs Crossplane, configures the AWS provider, and provisions an S3 bucket. This setup runs locally within Rancher Desktop or any other container runtime that supports kind. Uses the example from AWS Quickstarts, with additional automation.

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Ditch the Gliffy, Excalidraw, and Visio and Begin Modelling as Code with Structurizr

Tired of architecture diagrams that are perpetually out-of-date, inconsistent, or locked away in proprietary tools? Do you find yourself dreading the task of updating that Visio diagram after a minor infrastructure change? There’s a better way: Model as Code. By defining your architecture using a textual Domain-Specific Language (DSL), you can version control, automate, and maintain your diagrams with the same rigor as your application code. This post explores how to use Structurizr and its DSL to create AWS deployment diagrams.

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