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Kubernetes The Hard Way

You might've solved this challenge way sooner than I attempted it. Still, I always wanted to go through the process as it has many angles and learning the details intrigues me.

This version, however, does not use any cloud provider. Specifically, the things I am using differently from the original challenge are:

• Vagrant & VirtualBox: For the nodes of the cluster
• Ansible: For configuring everything until the cluster is ready
• Cilium: For the network CNI and as a replacement for the kube-proxy

So, here is my story and how I solved the famous Kubernetes The Hard Way by the great Kelsey Hightower. Stick around if you're interested in the details.

How to Deploy NodeJS to AWS Lambda with OpenTofu & GitHub Actions

If you're a software engineer in any tier, there's a good chance that you're already familiar with the language and syntax of JavaScript. It has a very low barrier for entry and that is one of its strongest suits and what makes it so widely adopted and popular.

In this article, you'll learn how to deploy a JavaScript application to AWS Lambda using the principles of GitOps and with the help of OpenTofu as the Infrastructure as Code and GitHub Actions for the CI/CD pipeline.

Stick till the end to find out how.

Azure Bastion Host: Secure Cloud Access Made Simple

Discover how Azure Bastion can revolutionize your cloud security strategy. This comprehensive guide explains what a Bastion host is, why it's crucial for secure access to your Azure resources, and provides a step-by-step walkthrough for implementation.

You'll learn how to enhance your network security, simplify remote access, and automate Bastion deployment using tools like OpenTofu and Azure CLI. Dive in to unlock the full potential of secure, scalable cloud access for your organization.

Supercharge Monorepo CI/CD: Unlock Selective Builds

Monorepo is the practice of storing all your code in a single repository, which can be beneficial for code sharing, dependency management, and version control.

However, there is no free lunch! As your codebase grows, managing builds become unavoidably complex and time-consuming. This build time is billed on your organization and it can get quite costly.

In this blog post, we'll explore the challenges of building only changed applications in a monorepo and discuss strategies to optimize your workflow with selective builds.

If this gets you excited, let's dive in!

Ory Keto: Authorization and Access Control as a Service

Internet has come a long way since its inception. The first few years might have been a new adventure for those building web applications, but in the modern day software development and in 2024, you rarely stop to question most of the common practices around the industry.

One of the most frequent requirement for any application is to have some sort of access control policy. The most used approach in today's world is the use of RBAC. It makes a lot of sense to treat a group of one or multiple identities of a system the same way and grant or deny them a specific set of permissions.

Ory Keto comes with all the batteries included. It provides a fearless authorization platform, friendly API for developers, and scalable stateless application.

If you're creating an application over HTTP these days, chances are, Ory Keto has a lot to offer you. Stick around till the end to find out how.

How to Set Up Preview Environments for Pull Requests

Have you ever been frustrated at long merge queues? Did you ever wish there was a better and faster way to get feedback on your code changes and approval from your team members?

You may have also been on the other side of the table, reviewing pull requests and wishing there was a better way to actually test the revisions before approving it; giving you a sense of what it would feel and look like if it were to merge.

Netlify and other frontend hosting services have spoiled us with the ability to spin up a live instance of the application for each pull request for static files. But what about backend applications? How can we achieve the same and deploy our backend for every new proposed change in pull requests?

In this blog post, we will explore how to set up preview environments for each pull request using GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. This guide includes spinning up the application as a live instance with an internet accessible URL to preview and verify the changes before they find their way into the main trunk.

Unlocking the Power of VictoriaMetrics: A Prometheus Alternative

One of the main tasks of an operations team in any organization is to provide a solid and robust monitoring solution for the platform, the application, and the entire infrastructure.

Monitoring enables business owners to understand how their applications behave in a production setup, how to optimize it, and how to proactively fine-tune & forecast the future growth of the platform.

In this blog post, we will explore what Victoria Metrics has to offer, how to set it up and configure it to work as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus and a datastore for Grafana.

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity and Access Proxy Server

Ory has a great ecosystem of products when it comes to authentication and authorization. Ory Oathkeeper is an stateless Identity and Access Proxy server.

It is capable of acting as a reverse-proxy as well as a decision maker and policy enforcer for other proxy servers.

In today's application development world, if you're operating on HTTP layer, Ory Oathkeeper has a lot to offer to you.

Stick around to find out how.

Integration Testing with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a great CI/CD tool to automate the daily operations of your application lifecycle in many ways. It comes with a lot of features out of the box and even the ones that are missing are wholeheartedly provided by the community.

There are many great and brilliant engineers working daily to provide a fantastic experience for the rest of us.

In this blog post, you will learn how to perform your integration testing using GitHub Actions with all its dependencies and services spun up beforehand.

Stick around till the end to find out how.

How to Access AWS From Azure VM Using OpenID Connect

In the day to day operations of a software application, it is common to be in a position to manage and handle multiple cloud providers at the same time.

This can be due to the business requirements or because of technological constraints on the primary cloud provider of the company.

In this blog post we will see how to grant an Azure Virtual Machine access to AWS services, without storing any long-lived credentials and with the power of OpenID Connect.

If you've worked with either cloud, or want inspiration on how to apply this technique to your setup, then this blog post is for you.