Techtips

Introduction Sometimes things may go wrong, also during ugprade of the application that is deployed to a Kubernetes cluster with Helm. When something goes wrong, you fix it and re-try a deployment with the new fix included. But then deployment operation fails with following error message: Error: UPGRADE FAILED: another operation (install/upgrade/rollback) is in progress So, what does it mean and how can you fix it? Let’s find out! Controlled, manual fix This happens typically when Helm attempts to roll out a new revision of an application and then something goes wrong in the process, like a bug in an application itself or an issue inside the Kubernetes cluster, which causes the new deployment to never get completed. This faulty deployment becomes dangling, therefore preventing all the future deployments to be rolled out. You can easily check the latest deployment status by retrieving the history of application deployments with helm history. ...

It’s time for a new edition of Kris’s Quick cup of Kubernetes where I’m utilizing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for demo purposes!😺 In second edition of this tech tip series I would like to share a few tips related to CronJobs, Rolling Updates and AKS add-ons that can make your life easier when working with Kubernetes and specifically Azure Kubernetes Service. #1 - Run CronJob instantly Sometimes you may need to run a CronJob (scheduled Job) instantly, for example, when you’re debugging some execution errors. So, can you do that instantly or do you need to wait for the next time slot that the CronJob is scheduled for to execute? Well, you can pretty easily create a regular Job based on CronJob definition and in that way trigger it instantly - here’s how you can do that with kubectl: ...

Code reviews and pull requests are a totally normal practice these days if you’re working together with other developers. Even if you’re working solo you probably don’t want to commit to main branch directly if you have CI/CD in place. That’s when adding changes through pull requests and code reviews come into picture. For many organizations and development teams this can be a tough process for many reasons where urgency, time limitations, overload with other tasks play a huge role. Nevertheless we still want to ensure that the established policies are being followed in order to ensure that every single line of code we commit is of highest possible quality. And there are ways we can enforce policies of course. One of the ways are automated checks - this is a really important one since we want to avoid human error or a multi-tasking PR reviewer to miss out on a critical bug in the changeset. But it’s also about humans, about collaboration and making the code review process easier both for the one committing changes and the one reviewing the changes. And for that there are quite a few tools available! ...

With all the active development in the .NET world many of us have faced a situation where we need to update .NET target framework more frequently in order to be able to keep up, but at the same time to be able to utilize all the goodies .NET has to offer. It’s not a big deal when you have 1, 2, 10 projects but when you have 300+ projects that need to be updated? Then it can become a pretty boring and time-consuming process. And what’s boring must always be automated, right? 😉 ...

Starting a totally new Tech Tips subsection feels great - especially when it’s going to be purely dedicated to Kubernetes utilizing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for demo purposes! :-) In this first edition I would like to demonstrate 4 helpful commands that can make your life easier when working with Kubernetes. AKS will be my Kubernetes distribution of choice. #1 - Live streaming of Pod logs Sometimes it can be really useful to monitor application’s logs, for instance when there are errors happening during application’s start-up or while it’s up and running. If you use kubectl logs <pod_name> -n <namespace> you will only get what’s been logged until the execution of command. In order to stream logs and follow them in real-time you will need to use -f flag (“f” for “follow”) with kubectl logs command, i.e. kubectl logs <pod_name> -n <namespace> -f. ...