https://www.koslib.com/Recent content on koslibHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usMon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/postgres-to-typesense/Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/postgres-to-typesense/I needed to sync apx 1,000,000 records from Postgres into Typesense, in as little tiem as possible. And I pulled it off: a full backfill of a table in under 3 minutes. As always, I don’t work alone, even though in this project scope I pulled it off mostly myself. For the sake of completeness and to fill in details in the story, I’ll switch to “we” for the remainder of the post.https://www.koslib.com/posts/k8s-vcluster-wordpress/Thu, 19 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/k8s-vcluster-wordpress/Introduction Wordpress development agencies often excel at crafting beautiful, functional websites but may lack the infrastructure skills to offer robust hosting solutions to their clients. Some agencies even have the in-house skill to run and operate infrastructure, but they streer their strategy towards VPS-based/reseller solutions, eating up a big chunk of their profits. I recently started pondering with how this could be fixed by having something central (so that we didn’t have to deal with a bunch of different resources, for efficiency reasons) and still maintain a good service level.https://www.koslib.com/posts/how-to-become-a-cka/Tue, 25 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/how-to-become-a-cka/Feeling uncertain about things? Go through my How to become a CKAD guide as it will provide you with all the little details necessary for managing Pods, Deployments, etc. Also, if you are in need of a PSI bridge (the browser you will use during the CKA exam) simulator, feel free to use this one: https://github.com/42eleven/cncf-psi-k8s-linux-simulator. Grow an understanding of how to roll out a cluster And by rolling out I mean from scratch with kubeadm.https://www.koslib.com/posts/when-k8s-is-wrong/Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/when-k8s-is-wrong/One more controversial topic! Is Kubernetes always right? Or always wrong? Well…always is a pretty strong word so I’ll refrain from using that. But I don’t think anyone believes a blog should be hosted on Kubernetes…what if it’s Techcrunch size though or has complex business and/or data logic under the hood? Founder jargon demystified: "Our advanced AI powers the heart of our product" = We have a bunch of if-statements and a human responding manually to everything elsehttps://www.koslib.com/posts/tech-for-2023/Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/tech-for-2023/Want to stay updated on all-things SRE? Subscribe to my weekly newsletter Embrace Risk and get quality article & podcasts content every Monday! As the new year approaches, it’s important for everyone to take a moment to slow down and reflect on the past year. If you’re like me and always working to stay relevant in the software engineering industry, introducing and implementing new, cutting-edge technologies into your organization, there are plenty of exciting technologies to explore in the coming months.https://www.koslib.com/posts/how-to-become-a-certified-kubernetes-application-developer/Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/how-to-become-a-certified-kubernetes-application-developer/This guide is pretty much a summary of my study tips for passing the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam by Linux Foundation. However I’m not the typical student material as I followed some universally considered unorthodox methods, therefore I’ll give you my study tips as well as tips for making your daily work with Kubernetes a bit more pleasant. The exam The CKAD exam focuses on the following areas:https://www.koslib.com/posts/sre-product-engineering/Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/sre-product-engineering/Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline. It incorporates aspects of software engineering and applies them to operation tasks. It is borrowing a lot of Agile concepts hence it helps if your organization is already working with these principles in your day-to-day. This long-form aspires to put together my experiences so far and things I’ve learned the hard way. This is by no means a complete guide. It is supposed to be a high level overview to help teams understand more about SRE, act as a quick how-to and intends to be ready by Product and Engineering people.https://www.koslib.com/posts/troubleshooting-terraform-eks-module/Sun, 07 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/troubleshooting-terraform-eks-module/Intro Consider this article a memouir of my endeavours with provisioning an EKS cluster with Terraform instead of kubectl. Most of the articles and tutorials I could find online focus on simple use-cases and everything looks bright. Also, I noticed that a specific Terraform module is widely used by the community for spinning up a new EKS cluster. This article focuses on what can go wrong and takes an angle on how that can be solved.https://www.koslib.com/posts/k8s-apps-observability-grafana-cloud/Tue, 17 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/k8s-apps-observability-grafana-cloud/It may have been 9 full months since my last post, but here I am again! The what Modern apps are usually following quality KPIs, which are essentially checks against a threshold. These checks often compare a given metric captured from within the application, with the threshold value. Obviously there is a multitude of ways to measure quality statistics and gather metrics, especially in the Kubernetes world, Prometheus is the de-facto choice - probably deployed with Prometheus Operator or a similar approach.https://www.koslib.com/posts/eks-fargate-aws-lb-controller/Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/eks-fargate-aws-lb-controller/Intro With more and more apps running on Kubernetes, EKS is definitely one of the best managed-Kubernetes options in the market. I have been using EKS in production applications for the last year or so. Up until recently, most deployments on EKS were made using an NLB (Network Load Balancer), as creating an ALB (Application Load Balancer) for every service is at least cost-wise suboptimal. The latest version of AWS Load Balancer Controller, an ingress controller by AWS, was published a few weeks ago.https://www.koslib.com/posts/deploy-k8s-apps-helm-complete/Sat, 25 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/deploy-k8s-apps-helm-complete/After many years of using DroneCI, Gitlab or Travis for most of my projects, I thought to give Github Actions (GA) a try. My scope was to deploy a side-project I have on AWS EKS, but make it as automated as possible in every aspect. Then I quickly realized that no good complete tutorials, or at least people talking about their experience on this exact matter existed, and decided to write up my own.https://www.koslib.com/posts/entity-services-anti-pattern/Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/entity-services-anti-pattern/Lately, I’ve been participating in discussions where microservices patterns are the hottest topic. People coming from Java background most of the time go for a software design comprised of entity services. Spring even has a tutorial about creating entity services. Microsoft does too. That nearly explains why, I presume. In this post, I will explain my view on this anti-pattern. Backgound Once upon a time, there was a huge monolith. It started as a great initiative and helped the dev team release features easily and, frankly, quite fast especially in the beginning.https://www.koslib.com/posts/microservices-101/Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/microservices-101/Hello, is this thing on? Alright, now that we’ve established that this is a place where I publicly write about my experiences, I thought it’d be interesting to start with “all the steps you need to do before you consider yourself doing micro-services the right way”. Some background About a decade back, I was an entry-level software engineer. I was working alone on small projects, while I was breaking into all the new technologies.https://www.koslib.com/posts/hello-world/Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/posts/hello-world/Yet another attempt to revive my blog and shed some light into stuff I’m working on and I personally find interesting. Consider this a personal challenge of myself to express in writing every day stuff that I do and attract my attention, and could potentially be professionally (or not) beneficial for others as well. In this blog I’ll be writing mostly about: Python and Go best-practises Microservices and my experiences with service oriented architectures AWS deployments Kubernetes deployments and one thing or two that I pick up on my way Feel free to DM me on Twitter if you have a topic you’d like me to elaborate on, or hop on a brainstorming video chat, or generally just exchange ideas about technologies.https://www.koslib.com/page/about/Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000https://www.koslib.com/page/about/My name is Konstantinos Livieratos, just Kostas for short. Curious about everything by nature, software engineer/SRE by day and night. My activities: Site Reliability Engineer at Embark, working with scaling live gameservers using Kubernetes and Agones. ex-Detectify. I run Embrace Risk, a weekly newsletter for SREs with quality content to keep yourself updated without getting lost in thousands of social media content. Co-founder of Madinad, a premium advertising network. Not involved with the project anymore.