This article discusses virtual cloud hardware benchmarks, which help you choose the best performing virtual cloud-based CPU/disk/memory hardware for your needs. I go into the cost-benefit ratio of benchmarking, and provide many good practices for hardware benchmarking, such as ensuring proper reproducibility. Finally, I explore 6 off-the-shelf benchmark tools that measure CPU, memory or disk … Read more
This article uses my fully-automated benchmark suite which creates a temporary Azure Kubernetes cluster (AKS) with over 30 different Azure VM sizes, schedules a container-based benchmark on each VM (which measures CPU and disk performance), and collects + visualizes the results. I share the raw results and an Excel sheet with various meta-information and graphs, … Read more
Having multiple calendars that are not synchronized often causes scheduling issues. To solve this problem, I built a Microsoft Power Automate flow that synchronize Google calendar with Outlook. The flow is free / open-source, and here I explain how to set it up, configure and use it. Originally posted on 2024-01-14, updated on 2024-03-02 to … Read more
The year 2023 has come to an end, so I took some time to reflect on my activities. Website / Blogging – who is reading this anyway? In 2020, I relaunched my personal website, using WordPress with the GeneratePress theme, which has been a good choice so far. In general, WordPress is quite good, except … Read more
This article explores my Kubernetes operator that provisions Azure Pipelines agents as Kubernetes Pods. It comes with an in-depth tutorial for how to use my operator. I also explore all alternative options for running Azure Pipeline agents, and explain why using a Kubernetes-based option beats all other options. Introduction CI/CD pipelines are a cornerstone to … Read more
This article explains BuildKit caching in detail. First you learn background knowledge, e.g. how the local and remote cache differs, and what kinds of cache items BuildKit can store where. Then, BuildKit’s garbage collection is explained in detail. Finally, I present 5 tricks to speed up your image builds, e.g. tuning the garbage collection policies, … Read more
This article explains how Docker builds images with BuildKit, via buildx. It discusses the advantages of BuildKit over Docker’s legacy image builder, and then elaborates on three approaches for calling BuildKit in Docker: 1) using the embedded BuildKit library managed by the Docker daemon, 2) using a BuildKit container managed by buildx, and 3) using … Read more
In this post I demonstrate how I increased my productivity with the help of focus tools. They automatically reserve focus time periods in my calendar and automatically trigger my operating system’s focus mode on and off, based on the calendar events. Introduction In my daily work life, it is difficult to allocate time slots where … Read more
This article explains how to use “tar” correctly, to backup Docker volumes and restore them. I explain why two top-ranked tutorials are not doing a good job, by taking them apart. Finally, I give hints for creating backups of Docker volumes in production. Introduction Making a local backup of a Docker volume and restoring it … Read more
When the resources of a Terraform provider (e.g. Azure) define “computed” optional attributes, these are not properly covered by Terraform’s drift detection. As I will demonstrate, this can lead to non-reproducible infrastructure. I also experiment with Terraform’s behavior, depending on what you declare in your configuration file, the content of your state file, and the … Read more