Vault CLI in Containers

In many CI/CD workflows interfacing with Hashicorp Vault is required.

However, their CLI (or better called unified binary1) is stupidly big with more than 400MB and they seem to have no interest in making it any smaller2.

This is often a undesired size increase, especially when optimizing for pull and run time in CI/CD.

This note outlines a solution that brings us down from 400MB+ on disk for vault to about 300KB using curl and jq.

[Read More]

Post Mortems

Learning from incidents

Incidents happen, and we can and should always learn from them, to be better prepared for the next time things go wrong. A great tool to do that is the post-mortem, it is a process designed to recap the incident, learn from mistakes and improve the system as a result. Basic principles There are some basic principles that can help achieve a good post-mortem process. They are only guidelines and I recommend adapting them to what works best in your organization. [Read More]

Monoliths & Microservices

An opinionated overview

Ever since diving into the software development world I was troubled by a duality: On the one hand I have built and operated many services described as monolithic with relative ease, on the other hand I’m always told I, and others, should build microservices because they are better in a variety of ways. With this post I’m going to compare both software architectures by looking at the key benefits often associated with microservices and additional considerations I think are important. [Read More]