I have blogged before about how cool Let’s Encrypt is for getting your web things running under https. However I have just got myself a local kubernetes cluster and it is super easy to spin up new web services with SSL certs. The basic instructions can be found here but let’s look at what was involved. First of all...

Helm allows you to package your Kubernetes resources, manage configuration, and deploy updates with a single command. In this post, I’ll share how I used Helm to deploy my Hugo blog, making it easy to manage updates and spin up new environments. Full disclosure: My blog currently runs on an Azure Static Web App, but...

I know nothing (or very little) about Kubernetes. It is high time I do something to learn more about it. Kubernetes is a powerful tool for managing containerized applications, and it’s becoming a must-have skill for developers and DevOps engineers. In this blog, I’ll share my journey as a beginner exploring Kubernetes,...

Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that allows you to query, visualize, and alert on your metrics data. It is a popular tool for monitoring systems, applications, and services in real-time. In this post, I will guide you through setting up Grafana in Docker to monitor a simple .NET API. Setting...

Managing dependencies in .NET projects can become complex, especially when dealing with multiple projects that share common packages. NuGet Central Package Management (CPM) is a feature that simplifies this process by allowing you to manage package versions centrally. What is NuGet Central Package Management? NuGet...

A long time ago in my SysAdmin days, I was a big fan of Nagios . Recently, I decided to revisit it and see if I could run it in a Docker container to monitor my local network. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Nagios monitoring using Docker. Finding a Docker Image for Nagios First, we need to...

Creating pull requests is part of the development process when working with version control systems like Git. Pull requests allow developers to propose changes to a codebase and collaborate with team members to review and merge those changes. When you have long running branches, it can be challenging to keep them up to...

Terraform is a way to script the creation of Azure Resources. By scripting the creation of your resources you can run them again and again and be certain that everything is configured exactly the same as the script has specified. No more forgetting to tick the tick box, if it’s in your script then it will be deployed...

I have been using Azure DevOps (Or VSTS or VSO etc) for a while now and one of the great features is doing automatic builds with every check-in. This is more commonly known as a CI (continuous integration) build. More recently I have started playing about with creating my build using YAML files instead of using the web...

Let’s Encrypt is a free way to get a SSL certificate onto your website and until recently I had never tried it. It is very easy and I think it is awesome. IIS is the web server software the Microsoft include with Windows 10 and Windows Server. I have it installed on my laptop and it displays the default IIS page. It is...