Developer Friendly Blog

Deploy Consul as OpenTofu Backend with Azure & Ansible

Meysam Azad — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Deploy Consul as OpenTofu Backend with Azure & Ansible

In this blog post, we provide the necessary steps to setup a single-node standalone Consul server to be used as TF state backend.

In doing so, we aim to provide idempotent and reproducible codes using Tofu and Ansible, for the sake of disaster recovery as well as enabling team collaboration within version control system.

Deploy Static Sites to Azure CDN with GitHub Actions OIDC

Meysam Azad — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Deploy Static Sites to Azure CDN with GitHub Actions OIDC

In this blog post you will learn how to authenticate and deploy your frontend code to Azure CDN, backed by Azure Blob Storage to deliver low-latency static website to your users.

The objective is to avoid hard-coded credentials and only employ OpenID Connect to establish trust relationship between the Identity Provider (GitHub) and the Service Provider (Azure).

Cloud-Native Secret Management: OIDC in K8s Explained

Meysam Azad — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud-Native Secret Management: OIDC in K8s Explained

External Secrets is the de-facto choice for secrets management in Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies the task of the administrator(s) of the cluster, ensuring only the secrets that are explicitly defined are present and accessible.

It comes with many great features but most important than all is its integration with major cloud providers.

In this blog post you will learn how to deploy it without hard-coded credentials and using only the power of OpenID Connect for trust relationship between services.

Migration From Promtail to Alloy: The What, the Why, and the How

Meysam Azad — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Migration From Promtail to Alloy: The What, the Why, and the How

Promtail is (was) the lightweight log collector solution that sends the log over the HTTP to the remote backend. This remote backend is normally Loki but you can choose to send the logs to VictoriaLogs as well.

In this blog post, you will see the newer alternative to Promtail, Grafana Alloy. You will see what it is, why it's a good idea to migrate, and the how-to guide to make the jump with least friction.

How to Setup Preview Environments with FluxCD in Kubernetes

Meysam Azad — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How to Setup Preview Environments with FluxCD in Kubernetes

Preview environment is where you see a live state of your changes from your pull request before being merged into the default branch. It gives you a look'n feel of what it would be like if you merged your changes.

Kubernetes on the other hand, is what powers the production setups. But that's not all it can do for you. I have spun up preview environments in Kubernetes with different technologies in the past.

And in this blog post, I will show you how to achive this using FluxCD Operator.

3 Ways to Time Kubernetes Job Duration for Better DevOps

Meysam Azad — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

3 Ways to Time Kubernetes Job Duration for Better DevOps

Knowing how long the exucution of jobs take is a crucial part of monitoring and proactive system administration.

Being able to measure, store and query this value over the course of your application lifecycle can help you identify bottlenecks, optimize your infrastructure and improve the overall performance of your application.

In this blog post, you are presented with three methods to achive this, starting from one where you have the access and ability to modify the source code, to the one where you have control over its runtime execution, and finally without control on either & using only the Kube State Metrics.

Ente: Self Host the Google Photos Alternative and Own Your Privacy

Meysam Azad — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ente: Self Host the Google Photos Alternative and Own Your Privacy

In the recent few years, I keep seeing people being more aware of their privacy and taking it into their own hands.

More and more solutions are emerging through the community that address the critical part of our society and personal life; privacy!

In this blog post, I will introduce you to Ente, the Google Photos alternative.

You will see the codes required to deploy the server into a Kubernetes setup and host the frontend using GitHub Pages.

Stick around till the end if that's your cup of tea.

How to Deploy Static Site to GCP CDN with GitHub Actions

Meysam Azad — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How to Deploy Static Site to GCP CDN with GitHub Actions

Building and deploying static sites is rarely an issue these days. Most of the PaaS providers already have full support for your live and your preview environments and a clean integration with your favorite Git provider.

However, some organizations may choose to stick with big players like GCP for various reasons.

In this blog post, you will learn how to build your frontend and deploy your static files to GCP bucket using GitHub Actions and serve it behind GCP CDN.

In this approach we will employ OpenID Connect to authenticate GitHub Actions runner to GCP API to avoid passing hard-coded credentials (Actually, GCP calls this Federated Workload Identity but it is unsurprisingly based on OIDC).

If this sounds interesting to you, let's not keep you waiting any longer.

How to Publish to GitHub Pages From Another Repository

Meysam Azad — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How to Publish to GitHub Pages From Another Repository

In this blog post, you will learn how to leverage GitHub Actions to deploy static files to the GitHub Pages of another repository.

This can be useful if you keep your source code in a private repository, but also, you may find additional reasons to need this setup.

Stick around till the end to find out how to do this with OpenTofu.

How to Provision a Production-Ready Autopilot GKE Cluster

Meysam Azad — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How to Provision a Production-Ready Autopilot GKE Cluster

In this blog post I share my opinioated version of provisioning a Kubernetes cluster in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using nothing but Opentofu.

The principles discussed here are the ones I have learned while dealing with production setups at the same scale.

If you enjoy Kubernetes or want to learn more about GCP, this is for you.

Packer: How to Build NixOS 24 Snapshot on Hetzner Cloud

Meysam Azad — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Packer: How to Build NixOS 24 Snapshot on Hetzner Cloud

Packer is a powerful tool to create immutable images, with support for various cloud providers.

In this blog post, I share how I built a NixOS 24 snapshot using Packer on Hetzner Cloud.

If you're a fan of NixOS or want to learn more about Packer, this post is for you.

How to Create Your Ansible Dynamic Inventory for AWS Cloud

Meysam Azad — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How to Create Your Ansible Dynamic Inventory for AWS Cloud

Most of the modern software deployment these days benefit from containerization and Kubernetes as the de-facto orchestration platform.

However, occasionally, I find myself in need of some Ansible provisioning and configuration management.

In this blog post, I will share how to create Ansible dynamic inventory in a way that avoids the need to write hard-coded IP addresses of the target hosts.

How to Protect ANY Upstream Service with Operational Authentication

Meysam Azad — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How to Protect ANY Upstream Service with Operational Authentication

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to use Ory Oathkeeper and Ory Kratos to protect upstream services behind authentication, especially the ones that do not have native authentication built-in, e.g., Prometheus, Hubble UI, Alertmanager, etc.

How to Deploy NodeJS to AWS Lambda with OpenTofu & GitHub Actions

Meysam Azad — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How to Deploy NodeJS to AWS Lambda with OpenTofu & GitHub Actions

If you're a software engineer in any tier, there's a good chance that you're already familiar with the language and syntax of JavaScript. It has a very low barrier for entry and that is one of its strongest suits and what makes it so widely adopted and popular.

In this article, you'll learn how to deploy a JavaScript application to AWS Lambda using the principles of GitOps and with the help of OpenTofu as the Infrastructure as Code and GitHub Actions for the CI/CD pipeline.

Stick till the end to find out how.

Azure Bastion Host: Secure Cloud Access Made Simple

Meysam Azad — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Azure Bastion Host: Secure Cloud Access Made Simple

Discover how Azure Bastion can revolutionize your cloud security strategy. This comprehensive guide explains what a Bastion host is, why it's crucial for secure access to your Azure resources, and provides a step-by-step walkthrough for implementation.

You'll learn how to enhance your network security, simplify remote access, and automate Bastion deployment using tools like OpenTofu and Azure CLI. Dive in to unlock the full potential of secure, scalable cloud access for your organization.

Supercharge Monorepo CI/CD: Unlock Selective Builds

Meysam Azad — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Supercharge Monorepo CI/CD: Unlock Selective Builds

Monorepo is the practice of storing all your code in a single repository, which can be beneficial for code sharing, dependency management, and version control.

However, there is no free lunch! As your codebase grows, managing builds become unavoidably complex and time-consuming. This build time is billed on your organization and it can get quite costly.

In this blog post, we'll explore the challenges of building only changed applications in a monorepo and discuss strategies to optimize your workflow with selective builds.

If this gets you excited, let's dive in!

Ory Keto: Authorization and Access Control as a Service

Meysam Azad — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ory Keto: Authorization and Access Control as a Service

Internet has come a long way since its inception. The first few years might have been a new adventure for those building web applications, but in the modern day software development and in 2024, you rarely stop to question most of the common practices around the industry.

One of the most frequent requirement for any application is to have some sort of access control policy. The most used approach in today's world is the use of RBAC. It makes a lot of sense to treat a group of one or multiple identities of a system the same way and grant or deny them a specific set of permissions.

Ory Keto comes with all the batteries included. It provides a fearless authorization platform, friendly API for developers, and scalable stateless application.

If you're creating an application over HTTP these days, chances are, Ory Keto has a lot to offer you. Stick around till the end to find out how.

How to Set Up Preview Environments for Pull Requests

Meysam Azad — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How to Set Up Preview Environments for Pull Requests

Have you ever been frustrated at long merge queues? Did you ever wish there was a better and faster way to get feedback on your code changes and approval from your team members?

You may have also been on the other side of the table, reviewing pull requests and wishing there was a better way to actually test the revisions before approving it; giving you a sense of what it would feel and look like if it were to merge.

Netlify and other frontend hosting services have spoiled us with the ability to spin up a live instance of the application for each pull request for static files. But what about backend applications? How can we achieve the same and deploy our backend for every new proposed change in pull requests?

In this blog post, we will explore how to set up preview environments for each pull request using GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. This guide includes spinning up the application as a live instance with an internet accessible URL to preview and verify the changes before they find their way into the main trunk.

Unlocking the Power of VictoriaMetrics: A Prometheus Alternative

Meysam Azad — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Unlocking the Power of VictoriaMetrics: A Prometheus Alternative

One of the main tasks of an operations team in any organization is to provide a solid and robust monitoring solution for the platform, the application, and the entire infrastructure.

Monitoring enables business owners to understand how their applications behave in a production setup, how to optimize it, and how to proactively fine-tune & forecast the future growth of the platform.

In this blog post, we will explore what Victoria Metrics has to offer, how to set it up and configure it to work as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus and a datastore for Grafana.

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity and Access Proxy Server

Meysam Azad — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ory Oathkeeper: Identity and Access Proxy Server

Ory has a great ecosystem of products when it comes to authentication and authorization. Ory Oathkeeper is an stateless Identity and Access Proxy server.

It is capable of acting as a reverse-proxy as well as a decision maker and policy enforcer for other proxy servers.

In today's application development world, if you're operating on HTTP layer, Ory Oathkeeper has a lot to offer to you.

Stick around to find out how.