Posts
GCP ACE: GKE and AI — Training, Serving, and Cost Management for ML Workloads
Why ML workloads need different scheduling than a regular Deployment, and the GKE-specific tools (Kueue, Dynamic Workload Scheduler, Custom Compute Classes) built for them.
Read more →GCP ACE: Security Posture, Compliance, and Preventative Controls in GKE
The security posture dashboard, workload vulnerability scanning, node-level hardening, and how these checks turn into concrete, prioritized action.
Read more →GCP ACE: CI/CD at Scale in GKE — Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Cloud Run, and Supply Chain Security
From building an image to progressively rolling it out across fleet clusters, reaching private clusters from CI, and proving an image is trustworthy before it deploys.
Read more →GCP ACE: Managing Identity in GKE — GKE Identity Service and Fleet Workload Identity
Letting users authenticate to fleet clusters with your own identity provider instead of Google identities, and the fleet-wide version of Workload Identity.
Read more →GCP ACE: Multi-Cluster Networking with Cloud Service Mesh — Single vs. Multiple Network
Why some multi-cluster meshes need nothing extra for cross-cluster traffic, while others require an east-west gateway to bridge separate networks.
Read more →GCP ACE: Service Mesh Security — mTLS, Service Authentication, End-User Authentication, and Authorization
Four distinct security questions the mesh answers: is this traffic encrypted, which workload sent it, which human sent it, and is either one allowed to do this.
Read more →GCP ACE: Cloud Service Mesh Routing — VirtualService, DestinationRule, ServiceEntry, Gateway, and WorkloadEntry
The Istio API objects that actually control traffic inside the mesh: splitting traffic between versions, reaching external services, exposing ingress, and integrating VMs.
Read more →GCP ACE: Fleet Networking — Multi-cluster Services and the Multi-cluster Gateway
How a Pod in one cluster reaches a Service running in another, and how one load balancer routes traffic across every cluster in a fleet.
Read more →GCP ACE: Introduction to Cloud Service Mesh on GKE
What a service mesh actually adds on top of Kubernetes Services, how Cloud Service Mesh is provisioned and managed, and how a request actually flows through it.
Read more →GCP ACE: Fleets and Teams — Scoping Access Across Clusters
How a fleet gives individual teams their own slice of namespaces across multiple clusters, without handing them the whole fleet.
Read more →GCP ACE: Managing GKE Configuration at Scale — Config Sync, Policy Controller, Config Connector, and Blueprints
Four tools for keeping config consistent across a fleet: GitOps sync, policy enforcement, Google Cloud resources as Kubernetes objects, and reusable packaged configuration.
Read more →GCP ACE: Introduction to GKE at Scale — Multi-Cluster and Fleets
Why a single cluster stops being enough, what a GKE Fleet actually is, and the sameness/trust model that makes multi-cluster features possible.
Read more →GCP ACE: Multi-Cluster GKE Architecture — Centralized Management and the Connect Gateway
How you actually operate against many fleet clusters from one place: the Fleet overview in the console, and the Connect gateway for remote kubectl access.
Read more →GCP ACE: Pod Health, Rolling Updates, and Resource Requests/Limits
Liveness, readiness, and startup probes; how a rolling update actually proceeds; and what really happens when a container exceeds its CPU or memory limit.
Read more →GCP ACE: RBAC and Workload Identity Federation in GKE
Who can do what inside a cluster (RBAC), and how a Pod authenticates to Google Cloud APIs without a node-wide service account (Workload Identity Federation).
Read more →GCP ACE: Beyond Deployment — DaemonSet, StatefulSet, Job, and CronJob
The other Kubernetes workload controllers the exam tests: one Pod per node, stable identity for stateful apps, and run-to-completion tasks.
Read more →GCP ACE: GKE Networking — Ingress and NetworkPolicy
Routing external HTTP(S) traffic to multiple Services with Ingress, and locking down Pod-to-Pod traffic with NetworkPolicy.
Read more →GCP ACE: Persistent Storage in GKE — PersistentVolumes, Claims, and StorageClasses
How a Pod gets durable disk in GKE, backed by Compute Engine persistent disks, and how dynamic provisioning actually decides where that disk lands.
Read more →GCP ACE: Scaling in GKE — HPA, Cluster Autoscaler, and Node Auto-Provisioning
Three different autoscalers that solve three different problems: Pod count, node count within a pool, and whole node pools.
Read more →GCP ACE: Operating a GKE Cluster with kubectl
The commands you actually use day to day once a cluster is running: inspecting nodes and Pods, reading logs, getting a shell inside a container, and port-forwarding.
Read more →GCP ACE: Deploying a GKE Autopilot Cluster, Step by Step
A full walkthrough — from IAM prerequisites to a working Deployment behind a public load balancer — on GKE Autopilot.
Read more →GCP ACE: Kubernetes Architecture and GKE Autopilot vs. Standard
How a Kubernetes cluster is actually built — control plane and node components — and the practical differences between GKE’s two cluster modes.
Read more →GCP ACE: Containers, Kubernetes, and Building Images with Cloud Build
What containers actually are, why Kubernetes exists, the core Kubernetes objects you need for the exam, and how to build and push a container image with Cloud Build.
Read more →GCP ACE: BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataprep and Managed Service for Apache Spark
BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataprep by Trifacta and Managed Service for Apache Spark (formerly Dataproc): what each one is for, exact limits and pricing models, real gcloud/bq commands, and how to pick the right one on the exam.
Read more →GCP ACE: Managed Instance Groups and Health Checks
Instance templates, autoscaling, autohealing, rolling updates and health checks for the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam.
Read more →GCP ACE: Terraform on Google Cloud
The Google provider, the init/plan/apply workflow, remote state in Cloud Storage, bringing existing resources under Terraform, policy validation with terraform vet, and deploying Marketplace VM solutions with Terraform — for the Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer exam.
Read more →GCP ACE: Every Way to Connect a Network to Google Cloud
VPC Peering, Shared VPC, Cloud VPN (Classic and HA) and Cloud Interconnect (Dedicated and Partner): what each one connects, when to use which, real gcloud commands, and the exact bandwidth and SLA numbers the exam expects.
Read more →GCP ACE: Every Google Cloud Load Balancer, Explained
Application, proxy Network and passthrough Network load balancers in Google Cloud: how they differ, all 13 deployment modes, network tiers, client IP behavior, target pools, firewall ranges and how to pick the right one.
Read more →When your SSL certificate expires and you're the last to know
A quick lesson in why you need uptime monitoring before you need it — not after.
Read more →I passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam
Two weeks of studying, a lot of practice exams, and one less thing on the list.
Read more →How I set up CloudWatch monitoring and alerts for my EC2 instance using SNS
A practical walkthrough of setting up CloudWatch alarms and SNS notifications to monitor an EC2 instance — so you know when your server goes down before your users do.
Read more →How I built an automated news section for my blog using Python and Claude API
I added a fully automated News section to my blog that pulls from 10+ RSS feeds, lets AI pick the most relevant story, writes the article, and publishes it twice a day — without me touching anything.
Read more →Automating blog deployment with GitHub Actions
Every time I published a post I had to SSH into the server, run hugo build, and hope nothing broke. Here’s how I automated that with GitHub Actions.
Read more →How I built my personal blog on AWS for free
A step-by-step breakdown of how I went from a blank AWS VM to a live blog with HTTPS, a custom design, and an AI pipeline — all on the free tier.
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