Let’s assume you have a GitLab CI/CD pipeline that changes a repository. Or maybe you want to leverage full access to the GitLab API. What are the options? Option 1: Use a personal access token (PAT) You can create a personal access token and define it as a custom environment variable. You could put it in .gitlab-ci.yml, but…

Let’s assume you want to deploy a simple containerized application or service to the Azure cloud. Additionally, your service needs to be reachable publicly via HTTPS. This technical article shows you how to achieve this goal. Azure Container Instances According to the architecture guide Choosing an Azure compute service you’ve got several options…

Introduction Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration, and Vault by HashiCorp is the de-facto standard for secrets management. Now the question is: how do you combine those technologies to use secrets from your central Vault instance in your Kubernetes applications? One solution would be to use the AppRole auth…

Introduction Kubernetes is designed to run stateless workloads. These workloads typically come in the form of a microservices architecture, are lightweight, scale well horizontally, adhere to the 12-factor app principles, and can deal with circuit breakers and chaos monkeys. Kafka on the other side is essentially a distributed database. This means…

Open source turns 20 this year — happy birthday! In this blog I will touch on several aspects of open source software (OSS) and tell you why I think it’s so important. Why is open source so valuable? There are a number of reasons: First of all, you don’t have to pay license fees or subscriptions…

Recently, I was asked if I could help implement a prototype based on the Corda blockchain technology. The idea was to build a novel type of document management system (DMS) which can be used to securely share legal documents between companies or business units. I had never heard of the…

Computing in distributed systems is difficult. However, we live in a distributed world: the Internet, web apps, and most mobile apps would not be able to run on only one huge central server. …

How do you manage your database passwords for your application when applying the DevOps practice Everything as Code? This article gives you some directions. What is Config as Code? Before we can dive into Secure Config as Code we have to know what “… as Code” means: Config as Code is about treating the configuration…

DevOps is difficult to explain as there is no exact definition. Here’s my attempt to give a quick explanation and an overview of the pillars of DevOps. DevOps is a cultural movement that aims to improve the collaboration between development and operations, resulting in getting changes faster and more frequently…