Blog

By Sander Knape on Jul 23, 2019

It hasn’t been that long since it was normal to request compute capacity at some operations department within your organization. In fact, it’s probably still pretty common in some organizations. With the move to virtualization and especially the cloud, this process of course has changed dramatically for the good. Not only compute capacity for applications, but also resources such as databases, queues, load balancers and storage are now available virtually unlimited.

By Sander Knape on Jun 17, 2019

How do you properly use secrets in your Dockerfile? In this blog post we'll look into a common use case: downloading private git repositories through an `npm install`. We'll dive into two different methods to tackle this in a way that we not expose our secrets in our Docker layers.

By Bas Tichelaar on Jun 5, 2019

After our succesful first meetup about Kubernetes, we have set the date for our next meetup: June 27th. This time with more focus on programming. We will start with a talk about how to change architecture in production while at the same time migrating to the cloud. Sven Rienstra, one of our Cloud Developers, will talk about his experience at majestic.co.uk, where he was involved in migrating nakedwines.com from a monolith into microservices running in the cloud.

By Sander Knape on May 31, 2019

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is a new framework for defining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by AWS. It allows you to write IaC in a set of different languages. At the moment the following languages are supported: Javascript, Typescript, Python, Java, .NET. Support for other languages is coming. Of course, other methods like CloudFormation and Terraform already exist to write IaC. Using these tools you write declarative code in YAML, JSON or the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) in a mostly declarative state.

By Sander Knape on Mar 15, 2019

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. It can deploy multiple Kubernetes files and resources as a single package with a single lifecycle. One of the most powerful features of Helm is the templating. This makes it much easier to create templates that can be used by different teams for different purposes. This is especially interesting for templates such as mysql/stable. This Helm Chart can be used for many different purposes such as for a sandbox environment or for production usage. However, the templating can also be used for a few nice-to-have features for more simple deployments that are more homogeneous.