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.

PgDog is a transaction pooler and logical replication manager that can shard PostgreSQL. Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage hundreds of databases and hundreds of thousands of connections.

In this post, I want to dive deep into VPA (version 1.3.0), explain why it could be useful for you, and provide a quick overview in the first section if you're short on time. This article mainly focuses on the Recommender component - I'll cover the other two in a future post.

1. Don't Skimp on Resource Requests and Limits
2. Namespace Like Your Life Depends on It
3. Avoid Running Multiple Containers in One Pod Unless Necessary
4. Use a Package Manager for Your YAML Files
5. Ingress and Networking Best Practices
6. Lean On Liveness, Readiness, and Startup Probes
7. Mind Your Security: RBAC, Pod Security, and Secrets
8. Monitor Everything (And Then Monitor Some More)
9. Automate Deployments with CI/CD
10. Keep Your Kubernetes Cluster and Components Updated
11. Use Labels and Annotations Wisely
12. Adopt a Multi-Environment Approach
13. Optimize Your Container Images
14. Implement a Reliable Logging Strategy
15. Treat Kubernetes Like Cattle, Not a Pet
16. Consider a Higher-Level Approach for Complex Deployments
17. Final Thoughts

Ever notice how major system failures rarely start with major problems? That's exactly what happened to us when a simple push notification exposed the fragility of our Kubernetes infrastructure. But here's the twist: it wasn’t a bug that took us down—it was our own success.

What is a quality gate? A quality gate is a milestone in an IT project that requires that predefined criteria be met before the project can proceed to the next phase. We set quality gates for code programs, run unit/integration/acceptance tests, and run static code analysis before merging code from the developer's branch into the main branch. But do we set quality gates for helm charts? Or should we?

We should and I will present an example of how to do that.

In this article, I will share how I built a computing cluster with around 100 CPU cores and approximately 400 GB of RAM while keeping costs as low as possible.

Adding container drift detection to Google’s Container Explorer

Generate Kubernetes architecture diagrams from Kubernetes manifest files, kustomization files, Helm charts, helmfile descriptors, and actual cluster state.

The OpenTelemetry ecosystem continues to evolve with powerful tools that enhance your observability strategy. Among these, the OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL) stands out as an incredible capability for manipulating and transforming telemetry data.

This guide explores what OTTL is, how it works, and how you can leverage it to maximize the value of your observability data with minimal effort.