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Jerrod Kim
Jerrod Kim

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My First GKE Experience - GKE Turns 10 Hackathon.

#gkehackathon #gketurns10

This post is about creating a project for the GKE Turns 10 Hackathon - https://gketurns10.devpost.com/

For the GKE Turns 10 Hackathon, I decided to extend Bank of Anthos with a retirement planning dashboard. (Bank of Anthos is a sandbox project you can run on GKE.)The idea was to give users a way to check their savings goals, get AI-powered advice from Google Gemini, and even look up side jobs through the Adzuna API. And I also did execute!

Some stuff I went through:

  • The app itself wasn’t the hard part—the real challenge was getting it running smoothly on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Along the way, I hit several bumps:
  • Secrets not set up → My pods wouldn’t start because I forgot to apply the JWT secret. This was in the readme.md in the root directory. I'm the one who missed it.
  • Cluster too small → Some services stayed in Pending until I scaled the cluster up. Wasn't expecting services to stop working when I lowered the cpu requirements in the yaml files because GKE costs were higher than I had anticipated..!
  • Docker image mismatch → I built locally on a Mac (ARM) but GKE nodes use AMD64. Quick fix here.
  • Service exposure confusion → My dashboard worked internally, but I couldn’t access it until I switched the service type from ClusterIP to LoadBalancer. Even as a rookie, I can see this being a rookie mistake.
  • Each issue was frustrating in the moment, but they helped me get closer to understanding GKE.. hopefully it did:)

So in the end..

Anway, I ended up being able to build a dashboard that:

  • Hooks directly into the Bank of Anthos frontend
  • Provides personalized AI retirement advice
  • Surfaces job listings to boost income
  • Runs consistently on GKE (GKE is expensive for a solo dev I gotta say. Good thing I got $100 credit from the hackathon but it's running out real fast)

Final Thoughts

I could see how GKE and Kubernetes are essential for large, large projects. As a solo dev, I've been mainly using things like Firebase and maybe Cloudflare. I do feel that I need to up my ante to be on the next level as a dev and a founder. I'm still too uninitiated. Still taking small baby steps:)

This post was created for the purposes of entering the GKE Turns 10 Hackathon.

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