Solidblocks

As the number of ready-to-use Terraform modules included in my open source infrastructure components suite slowly grows, ensuring quality has been a constant topic during development. I wrote in this post about the challenges of testing infrastructure. Dogfooding the infra-test library I wrote back then to test my newly released web-s3-docker module has led to some major improvements around integration-testing Terraform modules that will be the main topic of this post. [Read More]

Just in time for the public holiday in Germany, the Solidblocks infrastructure components collection got another addition. solidblocks-dns is a Kotlin library that lets you interact with the Hetzner DNS API to easily manage DNS zones and records.

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One of the main benefits of using infrastructure-as-code is the reproducibility of your environments. No matter what happens, you can wipe everything away and rebuild from scratch. Like with many things, practice is required to ensure that the bootstrap capability is not lost over time. Typically, you will want to regularly wipe and rebuild your test (or development) environment to prevent cyclic dependencies from creeping in, ensuring that your bootstrapping code still functions as intended. [Read More]

As time goes by and a project grows, ideas and concepts that initially seemed like good and pragmatic solutions can sometimes deteriorate into a convoluted mess. Recently, implementing a small feature in the Solidblocks infrastructure suite went from a pleasant Friday afternoon coding session to an integration testing nightmare, caused by an overabundance of infrastructure testing approaches.

This post will highlight the different approaches and offer a streamlined solution that will work indefinitely (until it doesn’t :-)).

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After years of shifting workloads to the big cloud providers like AWS or Azure, I am now more often confronted with situations where the deployed cloud infrastructures become unmanageable cost and complexity wise. A nice, fast and inexpensive alternative for smaller projects is the Hetzner Cloud featuring all basic needed building blocks like VMs, block devices, networking, firewalls and load-balancers. One major drawback with Hetzner is though, that there is no pendant to the AWS RDS service family, meaning we have to start to self-manage our state (and backups) again. [Read More]