Category: Software

  • Terraform Azure AD

    Over the last week or so, I realized that while I bang the drum of infrastructure as code very loudly, I have not been practicing it at home. I took some steps to reconcile that over the weekend. The Goal I have a fairly meager home presence in Azure. Primarily, I use a free version…

  • Automating Grafana Backups

    After a few data loss events, I took the time to automate my Grafana backups. A bit of instability It has been almost a year since I moved to a MySQL backend for Grafana. In that year, I’ve gotten a corrupted MySQL database twice now, forcing me to restore from a backup. I’m not sure…

  • My Introduction to Kubernetes NetworkPolicy

    The Bitnami Redis Helm chart has thrown me a curve ball over the last week or so, and made me look at Kubernetes NetworkPolicy resources. Redis Chart Woes Bitnami seems to be updating their charts to include default NetworkPolicy resources. While I don’t mind this, a jaunt through their open issues suggests that it has…

  • Upgrades and Mermaids

    What I thought was going to be a small upgrade to fix a display issue turned into a few nights of coding. Sounds like par for the course. MD-TO-CONF I forked RittmanMead’s md-to-conf project about 6 months ago in order to update the tool for Confluence Cloud’s new API version and to move it to…

  • Building a Radar, Part 1 – A New Pattern

    This is the first in a series meant to highlight my work to build a non-trivial application that can serve as a test platform and reference. When it comes to design, it is helpful to have an application with enough complexity to properly evaluate the features and functionality of proposed solutions. Backend For Frontend Lately,…

  • A Tale of Two Proxies

    I am working on building a set of small reference applications to demonstrate some of the patterns and practices to help modernize cloud applications. In configuring all of this in my home lab, I spent at least 3 hours fighting a problem that turned out to be a configuration issue. Backend-for-Frontend Pattern I will get…

  • Tech Tip – Chiseled Images from Microsoft

    I have been spending a considerable amount of time in .Net 8 lately. In addition to some POC work, I have been transitioning some of my personal projects to .Net 8. While the details of that work will be the topic of a future post (or posts), Microsoft’s chiseled containers are worth a quick note.…

  • Mermaids!

    Whether it’s software, hardware, or real world construction, an architect’s life is about drawings. I am always on the lookout for new tools to make keeping diagrams and drawings up-to-date, and, well, I found a mermaid.

  • More GitOps Fun!

    I have been curating some scripts that help me manage version updates in my GitOps repositories… It’s about time they get shared with the world. What’s Going On? I manage the applications in my Kubernetes clusters using Argo CD and a number of Git repositories. Most of the ops- repositories act as “desired state” repositories.…

  • Distributing C# Code Standards with a Nuget Package

    The commercial spirit of the season has me creating all kinds of new packages.