Posts on Nick Cleary

Learning Cloud Native Without the Cloud Part 1

nick@nicleary.com (Nick Cleary) — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 13:11:31 -0400

In this first proper installment in the series, we will be installing Proxmox on our server and creating our first virtual machine.

But first, let’s discuss some concepts.

What is a virtual machine

A virtual machine (VM) is an entirely software-based emulation of computer hardware. For all intents and purposes, a virtual machine behaves identically to a physical computer, but comes with several key benefits:

Virtual machines are more easily managed than physical machines. They can be created, destroyed, copied and edited with the click of a button, or represented in code with Infrastructure as Code
Virtual machines allow for more efficient allocation of compute resources. If you have several servers each which need 8 GBs of RAM, it is often less expensive to purchase a single piece of physical hardware, and divide the resources using virtual machine than to buy several low powered servers
Virtual machines facilitate running multiple operating systems on physical piece of hardware. Each virtual machine runs its own copy of an operating system, which means that Windows and Linux servers can share the same hardware

What is a hypervisor

A hypervisor is a piece of software that manages virtual machines. It allocates resources to each of the virtual machines and provides a method for the user to manage those VMs. There are two types of hypervisors:

Learning Cloud Native Without the Cloud: Part 0

nick@nicleary.com (Nick Cleary) — Wed, 14 May 2025 21:34:50 -0400

Have you ever wanted to learn Kubernetes? Infrastructure as code? DevOps practices?

Have you ever wanted to learn cloud native technologies, but don’t know how? Does the idea of spending lots of money on costly cloud subscriptions and cloud computing scare you away?

Have no fear! This is the series for you! In this series we will:

Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision resources on our own hardware
Deploy and manage a Kubernetes cluster
Deploy applications to the Kubernetes cluster
Use GitOps to manage applications deployed to a cluster
Use Cloud Native technologies to simulate a environment, similar to what used by companies everyday

All without purchasing any cloud resources.

Hello World!

nick@nicleary.com (Nick Cleary) — Sun, 11 May 2025 15:49:12 -0400

Hello World!

Hello to the great big world! This is my first post to this blog, and is just a place holder for now. It’ll probably be deleted. Feel free to relish in the glow of it in the sun, quote it in profound ways, and gift it to your friends.