Our monthly AWS bill is millions of dollars per year. So, we’re always trying to reduce costs.

Here are a few tips – some of these are Kubernetes but mainly AWS:

• reduce size of pods
• get the right node size and type
• get the right instance class
• don’t over-provision storage
• clean up lost resources

https://medium.com/@dyachuk/why-do-kubernetes-clusters-in-aws-cost-more-than-they-should-fa510c1964c6

Cost Optimization is also one of the five pillars of the Well-Architected Framework from AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/

i.e. https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/architecture/AWS-Cost-Optimization-Pillar.pdf

Billing Dashboard AWS: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home

Business Intelligence software:

https://www.qlik.com/us

Shift Cmd .

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/250638/how-to-reveal-dot-files-in-finder

You see it everywhere – from Windows dialogs to AWS.

Wizards are supposed to simplify a task by focusing on just a few specific items.

But the problem is that you can end up losing track of the big picture whilst you’re traversing a long wizard.

You can only do this on the Desktop app – not web or mobile.

Hold and drag.

I spun up an EKS cluster and, when I ran:

kubectl get pods -n kube-system

got

More detail needed:

kubectl describe pods -n kube-system

Warning FailedScheduling 2m13s (x345 over 102m) default-scheduler no nodes available to schedule pods

Looking in EC2 Instances, I could see 2 EKS nodes running with the correct AMI IDs.

But Kubernetes can’t see these nodes. E.g.

kubectl get nodes

No resources found.

Note: low level objects like nodes aren’t namespaced – https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/working-with-objects/namespaces/#not-all-objects-are-in-a-namespace

TLDR: use Declarative. E.g. Helm charts

Imperative commands

• objects are created and managed/modified using the CLI
• all operations are done on live objects

E.g.

kubectl create ns ghost
kubectl create quota blog –hard=pods=1 -n ghost
kubectl run ghost –image=ghost -n ghost
kubectl expose deployments ghost –port 2368 –type LoadBalancer -n ghost

Or

kubectl create service clusterip foobar --tcp=80:80

To modify any of the objects you can use the kubectl edit command or use any of the convenience wrappers. For example to scale the deployment do:

kubectl scale deployment ghost --replicas 2 -n ghost

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/object-management-kubectl/imperative-command/

Declarative mode

Use a YAML file and run something like:

kubectl apply -f <object>.yaml

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/object-management-kubectl/declarative-config/

More: https://medium.com/bitnami-perspectives/imperative-declarative-and-a-few-kubectl-tricks-9d6deabdde

I’ve got a delivery from the US.

I wasn’t at home when it arrived. There wasn’t a card but according to the tracking number, it was supposed to be delivered the next day by 6pm.

I stayed in all day. I was pretty sure it wouldn’t arrive.

By 4pm I was sure and called and asked. They said it was on the van.

By 5pm their phone lines stopped answering.

By 6:40pm no parcel and the website said their office hours were 9am to 6pm.

I rang the US International office. They said they’d have to put me through to the UK office. I explained that this would be shut. But they gave me the UK International number anyway.

Which turned out to be wrong. It was an 0845 number and I had to redial with 0345. Finally I got through to reach an answering maching which said they were shut.

And they disconnected.

Why was I so sure it wouldn’t arrive?

‘cos this happened exactly the same last time.