This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jerrod Kim
This post was created for the purposes of entering the GKE Turns 10 Hackathon.
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 thorugh:
- 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.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jerrod Kim