Latest blog posts about Devops

Managing secrets in Git repositories has been one of the biggest issues when I write code. I have used multiple solutions based on the complexity and how many things I have to do in case of leaks. I was looking for a solution that would work and be good enough for my simple Ansible Playbooks, and I stumbled upon the Mozilla SOPS: something that makes handling secrets not complicated when working alone on simple projects.

A few months ago, I became the Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Visma e-conomic. This new position is allowing me to work with brilliant people! In our industry, brilliant colleagues often have a hard time collaborating, and communication is very hard. In this post, I want to talk about the start of our journey from an Operational (Ops) team to embracing SRE using kindness and compassion as a way: Trust and forgiveness.

I recently decided to replace my k8s home cluster with a Hashicorp Nomad cluster on my 3 Raspberry Pis. When I was using it, I found myself writing a significant amount of HCL files, and I have been missing Helm’s simplicity.

As an SRE, I have been working with Kubernetes for a while now. During this time, I had to install, configure, and distribute some apps using Helm. For me, it is a de-facto standard when it comes to deploy and maintain apps that otherwise would require a way bigger list of YAML files. Can we do the same for Nomad Jobs’s definitions?

I have the feeling that a blog post about distributing packages is needed. 😮 In a word filled with Containers, PaaS, and SaaS, it seems weird to talk about how we can automate the creation of Debian packages and APT repositories. Nonetheless, even if this appears to be a forgotten step for operations, some projects are not distributed over Debian packages, 👷‍♂️ and I need them for my Raspberry Pi! 😜

During the last year, I have been curious about Immutable Infrastructure. After researching, I noticed that I had been applying some of these concepts already to stateless Docker containers, and I wanted to do a practical project with it. So I thought about exploring Immutable Infrastructure and use it to deploy Hashicorp Vault.

I really care about keeping the OS clean and untouched. Sometimes, when I have to develop using specific softwares and tools, I have to modify core and important sections of the system on my Mac or PC, and this can create some problems with package managers (like homebrew for Mac OS X; or like APT, pacman or yum for GNU/Linux)… For example, few months ago I installed node.js on my Mac using the official package.