Paul Czarkowski

About Me

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Czarkowski is a seasoned DevOps engineer, cloud architect, and open-source advocate with over 20 years of experience designing, automating, and scaling IT infrastructure. Originally from Brisbane, Australia, Paul has spent the past 15 years in the United States working with industry-leading technology companies including Red Hat, VMware, IBM, and Electronic Arts, where he specialized in large-scale cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and DevOps automation. Paul has been at the forefront of cloud-native technology, running Docker in production as early as 2014 and pioneering Kubernetes automation before it became an industry standard.

Streaming DevOpsDays Texas

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently had the privilege to help organize DevOpsDays Texas 2021, a virtual event that we ran to try and scratch our DevOpsDays itch given that in-person conferences won’t be happening any time soon. To see the replays of the event you can watch the Day 1 and Day 2 streams over on youtube. I had the dubious honor of being the most experienced at the technical setup for live streaming and therefore was nominated as the person to figure out how to live stream the event to Youtube.

Deploying and accessing a GCP SQL database via Kubernetes

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry for the long preamble, feel free to just skip straight to the technical details. Two years ago, faced with the challenge of wanting to reduce the tooling required to deploy infrastructure to Google Cloud I started working on a Google Cloud Operator. The goal of this project was to be able to stand up networks, images, and Virtual Machines for installing Pivotal’s PKS (now Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated). This worked out pretty well for me and I was able to create/destroy environments at will seeded from a single node GKE cluster running the operator.

How to broadcast to Twitch and Zoom with OBS

Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Note: I have an updated, simpler version of this on Github with saved exports of profile and sources here. If you prefer a Video Tutorial, you can watch me screencast it on youtube, otherwise read on below. Recent world events (COVID-19) has completely turned the Developer Advocacy role on its head and many of us are scrambling to find new ways to effectively reach audiences remotely. Many of us have been reaching for tools like Zoom for smaller groups such as Meetups and streaming platforms like Twitch / YouTube Live for reaching larger groups.

Streaming from Zoom to Twitch (or YouTube)

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Zoom meetings are great for a small number of people, and if you’re willing to buy a Webinar license you can also use it for a full on webinar (although there are some interesting restrictions to webinars, like you can’t have breakout rooms). Twitch is a great streaming platform, originally used for streaming video games, its now more commonly being used to stream live coding and another technology related things that involve sharing your screen.

Creating Self Signed Certificates on Kubernetes

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to 2020. Creating self signed TLS certificates is still hard. Five (5) years ago I created a project on github called omgwtfssl which is a fairly simple bash script wrapping a bunch of openssl commands to create certificates. I’ve been using it ever since and kind of forgot about the pain of creating certificates. Skip the words and jump to the examples [Creating self signed certificates with cert-manager] (#creating-self-signed-certificates-with-cert-manager), Creating multiple certificates from the same self signed CA with cert-manager.

Introduction to GitHub Actions

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After what seems like an eternity I finally got added to the GitHub Actions beta a few days ago. I recently created a Hugo website for learning Kubernetes called k8s.camp which is hosted in GitHub Pages and I figured that switching it from CircleCI to GitHub Actions would be a great way to learn Actions. Before I get started I do want to mention that my experience as a new user trying to learn how actions work was sub-optimal.

Creating a Helm Chart Repository - Part 1

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note: If this topic has peaked your interest, you can join me for a Webinar on August 15 where I’ll dive deep into Cloud Native Operations with Kubernetes and CI/CD Pipelines. Introduction Welcome to a three part blog series on Creating a Helm Chart Repository. In part 1 I will demonstrate creating a Helm chart repository using GitHub and GitHub Pages. In part 2 I will add Automation to automatically update the repository, and in part 3 I will add testing for changes to the charts themselves.

Creating a Helm Chart Repository - Part 2

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Welcome to a three part blog series on Creating a Helm Chart Repository. In part 1 of this series I demonstrated creating a Helm chart repository using GitHub and GitHub Pages. In this part 2 I will add Automation to automatically update the repository, and in part 2 I will add testing for changes to the charts themselves. If you’re into Videos, I walked JJ through starting with Helm from scratch all the way to creating a Helm Repo and CI/CD.

Creating a Helm Chart Repository - Part 3

Wed, 03 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Welcome to a three part blog series on Creating a Helm Chart Repository. In part 1 of this series I demonstrated creating a Helm chart repository using GitHub and GitHub Pages. In part 2 I will add Automation to automatically update the repository, and in part 3 I will add testing for changes to the charts themselves. If you’re into Videos, I walked JJ through starting with Helm from scratch all the way to creating a Helm Repo and CI/CD.

Spring into Kubernetes - Using Kubernetes as a Config Server

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In previous installments of Spring into Kubernetes I’ve shown you how to build images, deploy applications and write a Helm Chart for Spring applications. In this installment we’ll look at Spring Cloud Kubernetes integrations, specifically using Kubernetes Config Maps as a Config Server. Usually I would use a Pivotal Container Service cluster to demonstrate, but in this demonstration I’ll use a local minikube cluster. Spring Cloud Kubernetes Spring Cloud Kubernetes brings in a ton of integrations with Kubernetes.

Spring into Kubernetes - Deploying with Helm

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction In this installment of Spring into Kubernetes we’ll be looking at using Helm to install our Spring application to Kubernetes. About Helm Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. It provides tooling to create, template, package, and share Kubernetes manifests. A helm chart is effectively a signed tarball that contains a set of templated Kubernetes manifests, a metadata file and a set of default values. Helm has two major components, the Helm client and the Tiller server.

Cloud Native Operations - Kubernetes Controllers

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note: If this topic has peaked your interest, you can join me for a Webinar on August 15 where I’ll dive deep into Cloud Native Operations with Kubernetes and CI/CD Pipelines. Lulz what? Cloud Native Operations ?!?!?! Historically Operations practices have lagged behind development. During the 90s a number of lightweight software development practices evolved such as Scrum and Extreme Programming. During the early 2000’s it became pretty common to practice (or at least claim to) some form of Agile in software development.

Building Spring Docker Images

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

While investigating running Spring applications on Kubernetes I discovered that a lot of the existing example Spring applications do not have a Dockerfile in their git repository. I thought this odd at first (and frankly still do). What I discovered though, is there’s quite a number of ways to build Spring (and Java in general) container images that don’t necessarily rely on writing a Dockerfile. Full disclosure, I am a firm believe that any opensource project of consequence (where feasible) should ship a Dockerfile in their git repo, and ideally have images up on the Docker hub (or other public container registry) as it allows for newcomers to experience your application or project in just a few seconds with no need to play detective to try and figure out how to get it running.

Spring into Kubernetes - Part 1

Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Welcome to the first part in a series of blog posts looking at running Spring applications on Kubernetes. To kick the series off we’re going to take a look at the Spring Pet Clinic example application and demonstrate how we can quickly and easily get it running on Kubernetes. Step 1. Install a Kubernetes Before we get started I would encourage you to read (or at least skim) through Kelsey Hightower’s seminal Kubernetes The Hard Way to get an idea for the complexity of installing and operating a Kubernetes cluster.

The future of Kubernetes is Virtual Machines

Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Note: If this topic has peaked your interest, you can join me for a Webinar on August 15 where I’ll dive deep into Cloud Native Operations with Kubernetes and CI/CD Pipelines. Peering into the crystal ball Kubernetes as a technology has been very important to my career this year, and will be even more so for next year too. As 2018 comes to a close its time to drag out the hubris and make a bold prediction.

Building a Habitat Supervisor for Kubernetes

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Habitat is a project from Chef that provides you a reasonably simple way to build, package, and configure your application. “Habitat is an integrated solution to building, running, and maintaining your application throughout its lifetime. It builds your application and its services into immutable artifacts with declarative dependencies, and then provides automatic rebuilds of your application and its services as your application code and dependencies have upstream updates.” - Habitat Getting Started Guide.

Writing Your First Helm Chart

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I recently found myself writing instructions on how to deploy an application to several Kubernetes platform and ended up writing a different Kubernetes manifests for each platform. 95% of the content was the same with just a few different directives based on how the particular platform handles ingress, or if we needed a Registry secret or a TLS certificate. Kubernetes manifests are very declarative and don’t offer any way to put conditionals or variables that could be set in them.

Paul Talks about stuff

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:04:08 -0600

An incomplete list of events that I’ve spoken at 2018 Date Event Title Location Feb Cloud Foundry Meetup Singapore A DevOps guide to Kubernetes Singapore Feb Devopsdays Charlotte A DevOps Guide to Kubernetes Charlotte NC March NYC Devops Meetup A DevOps guide to Kubernetes New York, New York April Devops Madison Devops is dead, servers are dying, and I don’t feel too great myself Madison WI April CodeCamp Wellington Compliance as Code, Transform your security team with DevOps Wellington NZ April Longhorn PHP A PHP Developers Intro to Kubernetes Austin TX April Devopsdays Seattle Compliance as Code Seattle WA May Spring One Tour - Denver Emcee, Intro to Kubernetes Denver CO May Miami Kubernetes meetup Intro to Kubernetes Miami FL May VMWare PKS Roadshow Minneapolis Application Modernization and Replatforming with PKS/Kubernetes Minneapolis MN May VMWare PKS Roadshow Reston Application Modernization and Replatforming with PKS/Kubernetes Minneapolis MN May Spring One Tour - St Louis Emcee, Intro to Kubernetes St Louis MO June VMWare PKS Roadshow Chicago Application Modernization and Replatforming with PKS/Kubernetes Chicago IL June Cloud Foundry Meetup Tokyo Intro to Kubernetes Tokyo, Japan June Opensource Summit Tokyo Kubernetes Day 2 Operations Tokyo, Japan June Linuxcon Beijing Successful Patterns for running Platforms Beijing, China 2017 Sensu Summit Sensu @ Bluebox - Video | Slides 2016 All Day DevOps Serverfull computing - Video OpenStack Summit Barcelona InterOp Panel - Video OpenStack Compliance the DevOps way - Video OpenStack Day Seattle 99 OpenStack clouds on the wall - Video OpenStack Summit Austin A PaaS for Continuous Delivery - Video 2015 OpenStack Summit Tokyo Chef vs Ansible vs Puppet vs Salt - Video DevOps Days Austin Scout-A-Park a story of pragmatic dockerization - Video OpenStack Day Seattle Just enough OpenStack for Docker - Video OpenStack Summit Vancouver Docker Docker Docker Openstack - Video Docker Austin meetup Factorish - Video 2014 DockerCon14 Automated Chef cookbook testing with Drone.

Flexible Private Docker Registry Infrastructure

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 10:22:22 -0600

Previously I showed how to run a basic secure Docker Registry. I am now going to expand on this to show you something that you might use in production as part of your CI/CD infrastructure. The beauty of running Docker is that you can push an image from a developer’s laptop all the way into production which helps ensure that what you see in development and your various test/qa/stage environments are exactly the same as what you run in production.

Deploying a Simple and Secure Docker Registry

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 05:22:22 -0600

There comes a time in everybody’s life where they realize they have to run their own Docker Registry. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of good information on how to run one. Docker’s documentation is pretty good, but is verbose and across a lot of different pages which means having half a dozen tabs open and searching for the right information. While it’s pretty common to run the Docker Registry itself with little to no security settings and fronting it with NGINX or Apache to provide this security I wanted to show how it can be done with just the Docker Registry.

Securing Docker with TLS certificates

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 14:44:30 -0600

By default Docker (and by extension Docker Swarm) has no authentication or authorization on its API, relying instead on the filesystem security of its unix socket /var/run/docker.sock which by default is only accessible by the root user. This is fine for the basic use case of the default behavior of only accessing the Docker API on the local machine via the socket as the root user. However if you wish to use the Docker API over TCP then you’ll want to secure it so that you don’t give out root access to anyone that happens to poke you on the TCP port.

Deploying a HA Docker Swarm Cluster

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 14:44:30 -0600

Given Docker’s propensity for creating easy to use tools it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Docker Swarm is one of the easier to understand and run of the “Docker Clustering” options currently out there. I recently built some Terraform configs for deploying a Highly Available Docker Swarm cluster on Openstack and learned a fair bit about Swarm in the process. This guide is meant to be a platform agnostic howto on installing and running a Highly Available Docker Swarm to show you the ideas and concepts that may not be as easy to understand from just reading some config management code.

Openstacks and Ecosystems

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 13:00:42 -0600

I have recently had a number of lengthy discussions on the Twitter about Interop, Users, and Ecosystems. Specifically about our need to focus on the OpenStack ecosystem to extend the OpenStack IaaS user experience to something a bit more platform[ish]. I wrote a post for SysAdvent this year on developing applications on top of OpenStack using a collection of OpenSource tools to create a PaaS and CI/CD pipelines. I think it turned out quite well and really helped reinforce my beliefs on the subject.

Optimizing your Dockerfiles

Sat, 07 Mar 2015 13:25:29 -0600

Docker images are “supposed” to be small and fast. However unless you’re precompiling GO binaries and dropping them in the busybox image they can get quite large and complicated. Without a well constructed Dockerfile to improve build cache hits your docker builds can become unnecessarily slow. Dockerfile’s are regularly [and incorrectly] treated like bash scripts and therefore are often written out as a series of commands which you would curl | sudo bash from a website to install.

Factorish and The Twelve-Fakter App

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:29:27 -0600

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (in which case I envy you) you’ve heard a fair bit about The Twelve-Factor App. A wonderful stateless application that is completely disposable and can run anywhere from your own physical servers to Deis, Cloud Foundry or Heroku.

Chances are you’re stuck writing and running an application that is decidely not 12Factor, nor will it ever be. In a perfect world you’d scrap it and rewrite it as a dozen microservices that are loosely coupled but run and work indepently of eachother. The reality however is you could never get the okay to do that.

Multi Process Docker Images Done Right

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 21:31:03 -0600

For some values of ‘right’

Almost since Docker was first introduced to the world there has been a fairly strong push to keeping containers to be single process. This makes a lot of sense and definitely plays into the 12 Factor way of thinking where all application output should be pushed to stdout and docker itself with tools like logspout now has fairly strong tooling to deal with those logs.

Sometimes however it just makes sense to run more than one process in a container, a perfect example would be running confd as well as your application in order to modify the application’s config file based on changes in service discovery systems like etcd. The ambassador container way of working can achieve similar things, but I’m not sure that running two containers with a process each to run your application is any better than running one container with two processes.

BreadOps - Continuous Delivery of Fresh Baked Bread

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“See how this sparkly devop princess bakes bread every day with almost no effort at all with this one weird trick” Store bought bread is shit. Even the “artisanal” bread at most supermarkets is little better than cake baked in a bread shaped mold ( seriously check next time you’re at a supermarket ). You might be lucky and have a really good bread baker near you, but like butchers and other important crafts they have all but disappeared.

EZBake - A new way to converge docker containers with chef

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

EZ Bake came from an idea I had while watching the HangOps episode 2014-04-11 in which they were talking about Docker and Config Management being complementary rather than adversary.

I have expermented with using Chef and Docker together in the past but wanted to tackle the problem from a slightly different angle. I’ve recently been working on some PAAS stuff, both Deis and Solum these both utilize the tooling from Flynn which builds heroku style buildpacks in Docker.

Running DEIS.IO on Rackspace Cloud

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I recently did a presentation at the Cloud Austin meetup titled Docking with Unicorns about new PAAS on the block DEIS. Building out DEIS is quite easy, make more easy by some tight integration they have with Rackspace Cloud. If you’re interested in what deis is go through my slides linked above, and the documentation on their website. If you want to build out an environment to kick the tires a bit, then click ‘Read on’ below and follow me down the rabbit hole.

Managing docker services with this one easy trick

Sun, 20 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have been having a lot of internal debate about the idea of running more than one service in a docker container. A Docker container is built to run a single process in the foreground and to live for only as long as that process is running. This is great in a utopian world where servers are immutable and sysadmins drink tiki drinks on the beach, however it doesn’t always translate well to the real world.

Examples where you might want to be able to run multiple servers span from the simple use case of running sshd as well as your application to running a web app such as wordpress where you might want both apache and mysql running in the same container.

Creating immutable servers with chef and docker.io

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Building applications in a docker.io Dockerfile is relatively simple, but sometimes you want to just install the application exactly as you would normally via already built chef cookbooks. Turns out this is actually pretty simple.

The first thing you’ll need to do is build a container with chef-client and berkshelf installed. You can grab the one I’ve built by running docker pull paulczar/chef-solo or build one youself from a Dockerfile that looks a little something like the following…

Logstash + Opscode Omnibus

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

At DevOps Days Austin @mattray did an Openspace session on Omnibus which is a toolset based around the concept of installing an app and all of it’s prerequisites from source into a directory and then building a package ( either .deb or .rpm ) of that using fpm.

Having battled many times with OS Packages trying to get newer versions of Ruby, or Redis or other software installed and having to hunt down some random package repo or manually build from source this seems like an excellent idea.

To learn the basics I decided to build an omnibus package for fpm which helped me work out the kinks and learn the basics.

Vagrant+Puppet+FPM=Amazeballs

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of prototyping with Vagrant, specifically for a couple of distinct activities:-

building puppet modules using the excellent puppet sandbox project
and building RPM packages with FPM.

I realized I was spending a bunch of time flipping back and forth between Vagrant environments and I had no quick way to utilize RPMs built with FPM inside my puppet modules.

Creating a Github Pages Blog With Octopress

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of tech bloggers will write their blog posts in Markdown, convert it to HTML and paste that HTML into their blog of choice and then in the blog’s editor clean it up to suit their blog. This is an excellent way to create easy to read portable documents that can easily be published in multiple formats.

However what if there was a way to skip the second part of that and just create a markdown page, submit it into your source control ( you do use source control right? ) and your blog would automagically update.

Running KVM and Openvswitch on Ubuntu 12.10

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got an aging VMWare ESXi 4.0 server that needs to be replaced with something a little more modern and flexing. Obviously at home I don’t need all the cool features that licensed VMWare comes with, but I do want more than just the basic free version.

After a few weeks of installing and testing alternatives ( I’d really love to run openstack, but it’s just not worth it at home for a single box ) I’ve settled on Ubuntu 12.10 server running KVM and Openvswitch.

After installing Ubuntu 12.10 I did the following to get KVM up and running… I cribbed this mostly from blog.allanglesit.com.

Moving VMs from VMWare to KVM

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’m migrating from my old VMWare ESXi box to a new machine running Ubuntu 12.10 and KVM. Not wanting to rebuild all of my VMs I set about trying to work out the best way to migrate the VMs.

Steps to make Windows migrate without Bluescreen

If you migrate a windows box it’ll bluescreen due to the shock of so much hardware changing. The following .reg hack will prevent this from happening by opening up access to a bunch of random system drivers. Copy and run the .reg file in your VM before doing any further steps.

c:\temp\vmdriverhack.reg

Move your VM to shared storage

I mounted an nfs partition to vmware from my freenas box and migrated the data across using the vmware datastore tools. If you don’t have a NAS you could export a directory from your KVM server to achieve the same goal.

To move VMs in ESXi we click on the ESXi server, pick the Configuration tab, click on ‘Storage’ and then right-click on the datastore and select ‘Browse Datastore’. Select the VM folder you wish to move and click the move icon.

{% img https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-R5x6JyT5x14/UMUkr4qNr4I/AAAAAAAAAHY/CYhOlizOLb8/s640/VMWare-move-1.png %}

Moving from a self hosted Wordpress blog to Blogger

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I have a self hosted wordpress food blog hosted on an old silly domain that I’ve wanted to move away from for a while. I also want to stop paying hosting fees some time soon. Since I’m already looking at moving a lot of my day-to-day activities to the ‘cloud’ it made sense to pick a blogging platform that ties into a major cloud hub. Google’s Blogger was the obvious choice as I’m already using the Google Apps platform for my new domain paulcz.net.

Creating a blog on blogger is dead simple. I went ahead and created two: food.paulcz.net for the new food blog and tech.paulcz.net to start journalling random tech things. Transfering the blog content itself is quite simple, however, doing it in a way as to preserve links between posts, from other sites, and teaching the search engines how to find your new site requires a little more trickery.

Resume for Paul Czarkowski

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Czarkowski Senior Principal, Cloud Services Black Belts @ Red Hat 📧 username.taken@gmail.com 🌍 tech.paulcz.net | 🛠 github.com/paulczar 🛂 Citizenships: Australia, UK, USA Overview Senior Cloud & DevOps Leader | Kubernetes | Open Source Advocate | Infrastructure Automation Innovative and results-driven Senior Principal Engineer with 20+ years of experience in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Kubernetes, DevOps, infrastructure automation, and Open Source. A recognized leader in the Kubernetes and Helm communities, I have successfully built and scaled engineering teams, driven enterprise cloud adoption, and architected large-scale, resilient infrastructure solutions.