Playing with vCluster

After my previous posts related to Argo CD (one about argocd-autopilot and another with some usage examples) I started to look into Kluctl (I also plan to review Flux, but I’m more interested on the kluctl approach right now). While reading an entry on the project blog about Cluster API somehow I ended up on the vCluster site and decided to give it a try, as it can be a valid way of providing developers with on demand clusters for debugging or run CI/CD tests before deploying things on common clusters or even to have multiple debugging virtual clusters on a local machine with only one of them running at any given time. On this post I will deploy a vcluster using the k3d_argocd kubernetes cluster (the one we created on the posts about argocd) as the host and will show how to: use its ingress (in our case traefik) to access the API of the virtual one (removes the need of having to use the vcluster connect command to access it with kubectl),publish the ingress objects deployed on the virtual cluster on the host ingress, anduse the sealed-secrets of the host cluster to manage the virtual cluster secrets....

May 12, 2025 · 13 min · Sergio Talens-Oliag

Argo CD Usage Examples

As a followup of my post about the use of argocd-autopilot I’m going to deploy various applications to the cluster using Argo CD from the same repository we used on the previous post. For our examples we are going to test a solution to the problem we had when we updated a ConfigMap used by the argocd-server (the resource was updated but the application Pod was not because there was no change on the argocd-server deployment); our original fix was to kill the pod manually, but the manual operation is something we want to avoid. The proposed solution to this kind of issues on the helm documentation is to add annotations to the Deployments with values that are a hash of the ConfigMaps or Secrets used by them, this way if a file is updated the annotation is also updated and when the Deployment changes are applied a roll out of the pods is triggered. On this post we will install a couple of controllers and an application to show how we can handle Secrets with argocd and solve the issue with updates on ConfigMaps and Secrets, to do it we will execute the following tasks: Deploy the Reloader controller to our cluster. It is a tool that watches changes in ConfigMaps and Secrets and does rolling upgrades on the Pods that use them from Deployment, StatefulSet, DaemonSet or DeploymentConfig objects when they are updated (by default we have to add some annotations to the objects to make things work).Deploy a simple application that can use ConfigMaps and Secrets and test that the Reloader controller does its job when we add or update a ConfigMap.Install the Sealed Secrets controller to manage secrets inside our cluster, use it to add a secret to our sample application and see that the application is reloaded automatically....

May 5, 2025 · 16 min · Sergio Talens-Oliag