Terraform came late into my life, but I quickly fell in love with it. It was 2018 already and I was still using “native”, proprietary IaaC tools to deploy and maintain my infrastructures. All of a sudden, I needed to port a project to a multi-cloud environment and the old tools did not apply anymore. That’s when I met Terraform, wrote my first configuration, and never left it ever since. Indeed, I decided to port all of my existing infrastructure projects to Terraform. Terraform is very easy to get started with and has a soft learning curve if you are…

I will come clean: I began using GitHub Actions only recently and I want to make amends. I missed out, possibly because CI/CD Actions became generally available only in late 2019 and by then I was already well-acquainted and satisfied with other tools I used for ~5 years. Not trying something new just because the good ol’ stuff works is, indeed, against my own principles and overall a very bad idea. So eventually I tried the GitHub Actions and found them to be amazing!

GitHub Actions offer a complete and powerful set of functionalities, a lot of extensions are available…

I love Terraform for many reasons. One of them is the documentation. Oftentimes I only need to copy & paste snippets from the docs and change a few settings to deploy a resource.

So deploying a Lambda function on AWS should be as easy as using this snippet from the official documentation:

resource "aws_iam_role" "iam_for_lambda" {
  name = "iam_for_lambda"

  assume_role_policy = <<EOF
{
  ...
EOF
}

resource "aws_lambda_function" "test_lambda" {
  filename      = "lambda_function_payload.zip"
  function_name = "lambda_function_name"
  role          = aws_iam_role.iam_for_lambda.arn
  handler       = "exports.test"

  source_code_hash = filebase64sha256("lambda_function_payload.zip")

  runtime = "nodejs12.x"

  environment {
    variables = {
      foo = "bar"
    }
  }
}

…not…

In an effort to leave its troubled recent past behind, Docker has significantly revamped its business model over the course of this (very troubled indeed) year. As a part of this renovation, back in August the company announced big changes to the Docker Hub service too. Effective November 1, 2020:

• Stale (inactive for ≥6 months) images on the Docker Hub will be purged
• Pulls will be rate limited for anonymous users and free accounts

We should all know by now that there are no such things as unlimited services, capacity or vacations in the real world. Even huge companies faltered…

Video content is taking over the Internet. The trend began long ago and the most recent stats confirmed the predictions were correct. TikTok, a social network entirely based on video content, grew so much and so rapidly that it quickly became a “threat” to long-stading giants such as Instagram and even rasied concerns in the US government. …

I recently came across a tweet sharing a very strong opinion about the separation of “cloud” accounts to isolate environments. The subject has been highly debated over the years and while there is no “one size fits all” solution, there is a widespread consensus on the advantages of separated accounts. It often makes security and cost control easier to deal with and these are sound reasons to opt for the multiple accounts solution. The worst of them all, instead, is: “so I can hand the dev account over to the development team”.

I am a developer myself and worked several…

When I attended to AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas I had a clear feeling that everything in there was about serverless. Sessions regarding serverless computing and managed services were scheduled in the biggest and fanciest conference rooms available and were literally packed with people. Seats for sessions were reserved with severals months notice and people queued outside to wait for unclaimed spots.
Meanwhile, the adoption of containers had already been soaring for 3 years back then and it scored an impressive +75% in 2018.

The whole shift to serverless, containerization and DevOps practices made it so that we deal…

Helm is a widely used package manager for Kubernetes. It simplifies the deployment of many common applications and it also helps to create deployment packages for complex custom applications with dependencies. So installing Helm is one of the first steps many admins and DevOps engineers take during the deployment of a new Kubernetes cluster.

I have deployed several Kubernetes clusters now and Helm used to work out of the box, until I deployed one in China Mainland. The Helm installation failed consistently, but I eventually worked out a solution. …