Measure your golden signals with GKE Managed Prometheus and the nginx-ingress

May 23, 2022

Getting started with setting up proper monitoring dashboards for your application and infrastructure can be challenging. Where to begin? My typical answer to such a question would be to start with the “Golden Signals”. This blog post will dive into the golden signals and share how you can get started with these signals in Google Cloud using Managed Prometheus and the nginx-ingress controller. The Golden Signals The four golden signals - coined by the Google SRE book - can be considered a guide as to what at least to monitor for your applications.

Tags:  kubernetes ,  gcp ,  gke ,  nginx-ingress ,  observability ,  golden signals

Shift left AWS tag enforcement with Terraform and tfsec

May 3, 2021

There are many ways to improve the developer experience of deploying infrastructure into the Cloud. One such method is by shifting left: provide early feedback to shorten the feedback loop and speed up development. When deploying infrastructure into AWS with an infrastructure as code tool such as Terraform, you can validate that code as part of a CI/CD pipeline. A pull request can automatically receive feedback about the configuration of resources, thus enforcing the environment to stay compliant with the organization’s policies.

Tags:  terraform ,  shift left ,  ci/cd ,  tfsec ,  security ,  aws

Go crazy with GitHub Actions

January 13, 2021

GitHub Actions is a component of GitHub that allows you to create automated workflows. Through the many different events that can trigger workflows you are free to build whatever automation you want. While the most common use case is building CI/CD pipelines, the possibilities are pretty much endless. Check out this list of awesome actions to get some inspiration. Having spent quite a bit of time with GitHub Actions in the last few months I came across some features that aren’t very well documented.

Tags:  github ,  actions ,  ci/cd

A Serverless Payment Workflow using AWS Lambda and the AWS CDK

December 15, 2020

Serverless technology is getting more popular by the day. More and more people are starting to experiment with it and learn for which use cases it can add value. In this blog post I share an example of what a fully Serverless workflow can achieve. For a while now I’ve been curious how one would implement a payment workflow on a website. I was aware that platforms like Stripe, Adyen and Mollie exist, but I never knew how much work would be required to set up a fully functioning workflow.

Tags:  serverless ,  lambda ,  dynamodb ,  api gateway

Nuances around centralized platform teams

November 20, 2020

The popularity of centralized platform teams is rising. The latest Puppet State of DevOps Report shows that 63% of the respondents have at least one internal platform. Platforms are vital enablers for a more DevOps way of working as they provide self-service capabilities that development teams can autonomously utilize. The definition of a “platform” isn’t set in stone though. Many organizations still struggle to put together a platform team that is really able to add value to the development teams.

Tags:  platform engineering ,  autonomy ,  devops

Using Amazon Cognito JWTs to authenticate with an Amazon HTTP API

August 2, 2020

Last year AWS released a new iteration of their API Gateway product: HTTP APIs. This new version promises lower prices, improved performance and some new features. Some features that are available in the older REST API are not (yet) available for HTTP APIs, though. The official comparison page gives a good overview of which features are available in both products. My favorite new feature available for HTTPs APIs is JWT Authorizers.

Tags:  aws ,  cognito ,  http api ,  jwt ,  authentication

From toil to self-service: automate what matters

June 22, 2020

There are a few reasons that I love my job. One of the most important ones is the variety of work. As a cloud/platform engineer, every day is different. Work goes from writing automation in some programming language, setting up a dashboard in a monitoring/logging tool, hardening Linux machines, writing Infrastructure as Code, building (standardized) CI/CD pipelines, giving workshops, analyzing costs, and more. This wide variety of work wouldn’t be possible without automation.

Tags:  autonomy ,  self-service ,  automation

Deploy your pull requests with GitHub Actions and GitHub Deployments

May 6, 2020

Performing (automated) tests on pull requests is a powerful mechanism to reduce the feedback loop on code changes. Known as shift left, the idea is that the earlier you find an issue with your code, the easier it is to fix it. For one, as you wrote the code recently it’s easier to get back into it. And of course, any code issue that doesn’t hit production is another potential issue for your end-users prevented.

Tags:  ci/cd ,  github ,  actions

Why it's great to write blog posts

April 17, 2020

I’ve been blogging for close to four years now. I started blogging because I wanted to pick up a new skill (writing) and challenge myself to do something new. Because I blog about what is both my work and hobby - software development and more specifically, cloud/platform engineering - it’s relatively simple to come up with new subjects and I also grow my knowledge as I write these posts.

Tags:  blogging

Running self-hosted GitHub Actions runners in your Kubernetes cluster

March 16, 2020

Last year November GitHub released GitHub Actions, a CI/CD solution build on top of GitHub’s Source Code Management. GitHub Actions is very convenient to use when your source code is already stored in GitHub as no additional tool is required for your CI/CD requirements. This blog is for example updated through a GitHub Actions workflow whenever I push an update to my GitHub repository (like I just did with this post).

Tags:  github ,  kubernetes ,  actions ,  ci/cd