Architecture for generative Terragrunt & Terraform infrastructure as code (IaC)

This article covers a specific scenario where despite trying to leverage as many DRY (don't repeat yourself) principles made available to us by the underlying IaC (infrastructure as code) frameworks, sometimes we still need to elevate the abstraction to another level to fully reduce code duplication and gain larger economies of scale deploying large platforms …

Using private Python Azure Artifacts feeds in Alpine Docker builds

This one will be relatively short, figured I'd post this for anyone else who was struggling with use case. Your goal: your application needs to use a Python module that is available in a private Azure Artifact's feed and you want to pip install this module in a Alpine based docker build. Was recently working …

Immutable health check management

If you've ever had to monitor an application, endpoint or website, you've likely come across literally hundreds of monitoring services that can execute simple HTTP based checks from N global endpoints then notify an operator when certain thresholds are met. One of the more widely know services that can do this is Pingdom. On a …

State management in Tekton pipelines with Slack interactive messages

Earlier this year I re-entered the rabbit hole which is the dizzying world of CI/CD platforms and solutions. Today's marketplace presents so many choices that I can only imagine how daunting it is for a newcomer to the space to decide on what solution to go with. Thankfully the the industry is starting to invest …

Local developer CI/CD with Tilt

This post is a continuation into the world of locally executing CI/CD for developers, with my prior post being about Skaffold.  In this post I'll look at another one of these tools called Tilt. Background The world of software development and how apps are run in production environments has come a long way over the …

Continuous delivery with Flux

The acronym "CI/CD" and its respective phrases (continuous integration & continuous [delivery|deployment]) are sometimes munged together yet there are clear definitions and lines of delineation for each, despite many CI/CD offerings out there that enable you to use a single framework to implement both sides of the CI/CD equation using the same tooling. The intent …

Local CI/CD with Skaffold

The world of software development and how apps are run in production environments has come a long way over the years. Starting with bare metal physical servers, we evolved to virtual machines, onward to LXC, Docker daemons, and now our current state of container orchestration via things like Kubernetes. The other side of the world... …

Migrate from Helm 2 Tillerless to Helm 3

If you're like many others out there, you've been holding off of migrating to Helm 3 until at least version 3.1 is out. Well as of early February it finally was released. Since then I've recently gone through some analysis of migrating Helm 2 releases (with the Tillerless plugin) to Helm 3.x and figured I'd …

Why doesn’t Azure DevOps git repos get any love?

One team I've been working with utilizes Azure DevOps Git Repos, not necessarily by an act of free will, but more one due to their governance policies and budget reasons that are above their heads. Azure Git repos are fine, its Git, it works and gets the job done etc, but when it comes to …

git2consul alternatives: key-value filesystem syncing for Consul

I've recently been working on a project where a set of application runtime configuration was stored in Consul by using Consul's key-value store functionality. The application could dynamically materialize its configuration at runtime by using consul-template which is another handy tool by Hashicorp. Consul-template permits you "watch" a Consul KV space and automatically render Golang …