December 4th, 2024, started as a peaceful, snowy morning. Around 8 AM, I settled into my work-from-home routine, having freshly brewed coffee. My usual workflow:

1. Check the Production dashboard to ensure everything is running smoothly — and it was.
2. Check my email and Slack to see if any team member needs help.
3. Open JIRA, pick up a task and get ready to dive into work.

There were no pressing issues to address. I opened JIRA and picked up a task to migrate one of our Infrastructures as a Code repository from Terragrunt to Terraform. This is a topic for another post to explain why.

Lucked out! The peace and serenity didn’t last long. An alert popped up: One of our production services had gone down. What started as a calm Wednesday morning quickly turned into a troubleshooting adventure.

In this guide we will explore how Flux can be used to standardize the lifecycle management of applications by leveraging the Generic Helm Chart pattern.

The big promise of this pattern is that it should reduce the cognitive load on developers, as they only need to focus on the service-specific configuration, while the Generic Helm Chart shields them from the complexity of the Kubernetes API.

Khronoscope is a tool inspired by k9s that allows you to inspect the state of your Kubernetes cluster and travel back in time to see its state at any point since you started the application using VCR like controls.

kubectl-switch is a command-line tool for managing and switching between multiple Kubernetes configuration files located in the same directory. It simplifies the process of selecting a Kubernetes context from multiple kubeconfig files and updating the active configuration or namespace.

Just dump all your kubeconfigs into a single dir and let kubectl-switch manage them for you!

F2 is a cross-platform command-line tool for batch renaming files and directories quickly and safely. Written in Go!

Git-native dotfiles management that doesn't suck.

Move your dotfiles to ~/.config/lnk, symlink them back, and use Git like normal. Supports both common configurations and host-specific setups.

Many organizations have periods when they restrict deployments to production. You may find yourself working for one, so it's best to be prepared for it, and protect yourself from the downsides.

Mean Time to Isolate

My preferred way to store Terraform state files is close to the provisioned infrastructure. In my case this is mostly Azure Blob Storage. This approach offers built-in benefits like RBAC, versioning, locking, and identity-based authentication, making it an excellent solution for state management at almost no cost.

However, there’s a catch: you need to create the storage account before Terraform can use it. This creates a chicken and egg problem - how do you provision the state storage using Terraform itself without manual steps or external scripts?

In this article, I’ll walk through a fully automated solution to deploy Terraform state storage in Azure Blob and import “self” state there, ensuring everything is managed declaratively from the start.

The purpose of this tutorial is to provide a solid starting point for enforcing security best practices in your Terraform scripts.

After several years of working with GitHub and Azure DevOps on a daily basis, using different tools feels counterintuitive to me. However, one of my clients is deeply integrated with GitLab. Since I was hired to resolve some issues, I saw this as the perfect opportunity to dive deep into GitLab CI and implement a robust, version-controlled approach that supports collaboration while maintaining security and documentation standards.

This guide presents an advanced implementation of a Terraform modules monorepo using GitLab, featuring automated versioning, security scanning, and documentation generation.

In this follow-up to our "What Is a Terralith?" article, we shift the focus from describing the problem to providing a detailed migration plan, practical guidance, and a handy checklist for breaking up a Terralith into smaller, more manageable root modules.

A command-line benchmarking tool.

Railpack is a tool for building images from source code with minimal configuration. It is the successor to Nixpacks and incorporates many of the learnings from running Nixpacks in production at Railway for several years.