Description of a template repository to get started with provisioning infrastructure on AWS with Terraform — Terraform state, modules, workspaces, variables, outputs — getting started with the features of Terraform can be daunting. This post is intended to help you get started with Terraform and AWS in a simple and quick way. It describes a template repository for provisioning AWS cloud infrastructure using Terraform.

Hands-on-demo for setting up custom load balancing in docker swarm using HAProxy — Introduction Modern microservice-based web applications generally are designed to be stateless in order to be easily horizontally scalable to suit traffic load. However, many web applications are storing stateful information in session objects e.g. in Java Sessions idendified by a unique JSESSIONID. When there is only one instance of the application…

Complete Terraform Template for provisioning a infrastructure for hosting your Wordpress webpage using AWS Free Tier. — Inspired by the article “5 Steps to Create a Wordpress Site on AWS Free Tier” written by Women Decode which explains how to manually set up a Wordpress site using AWS Free Tier, I'm happy to share my complete Terraform template for doing so with you. In this post, you’ll…

How to provision multiple environments on different AWS accounts using cross-account roles and Terraform workspaces — Introduction Engineering of a cloud infrastructure usually involves the setup of multiple variations / configurations of the same infrastructure representing, different application environments. While a production environment meets the most sophisticated expectations on fault-tolerance, scalability and high availability, development environments usually provide a lean and cost effective platform for developers to…

A short guide preparing for the Hashicorp Terraform Associate certification exam — Since I recently took the exam, it might be helpful for someone to describe my preparation for it: All you need to take the exam is a GitHub account. You can register for the exam at https://www.hashicorp.com/certification/terraform-associate.The exam is monitored remotely and you need a PSI Secure Browser installed on…

How to reduce EC2-costs drastically without purchasing reserved instances. — Introduction Setting up a cloud architecture on AWS from scratch when developing a new project can quickly lead to rapidly increasing costs. It’s essential to be aware of service costs and to take cost-saving actions from the first day. Often, customers want to be as flexible as possible and, due…

How to use AWS SSM Parameter Store as central secrets storage and generating Kubernetes secrets using aws-ssm-operator — Introduction Managing secrets in Kubernetes can be a daunting task. Generally, it is in no way recommended to store secrets unencrypted in any git-repository. Often this leads to distributed secret-files among different developers or devops-engineers that are not version-controlled by git, but which need to be exchanged and managed somehow. Hashicorp…

When it comes to analyzing processes across multiple services in a microservice-architecture based application, one approach is to use a tracing tool. The principle of a tracer is simple. …