Trigger a Netlify build every day using GitHub Actions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Feb 20, 2022

I host this blog on Netlify. Often, I end up writing few blog posts on the same day, but not necessarily want all of them published together. Jekyll allows to add future date to the posts, and those posts will not get published until the date set. This lets me write blog posts on the same day, but publish them later based on the date set for the post.

However, this means that when you build the site (locally or on Netlify), posts with future dates will be skipped from the generated site. You will need to run build again on the blog post date to publish the blog posts. One way is to schedule a build on Netlify so that blog posts with future date can be included in the site. Curious how to do this?

Policy enforced deployments for your Kubernetes resources

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Feb 13, 2022

As your team starts to deploy resources to Kubernetes regularly, it becomes necessary for you as a cluster administrator to maintain good standards and consistency of the Kubernetes resources. Be it, ensuring all the resources have set of labels, or ensuring you only pull images from your enterprise container registry. Gatekeeper is a well known policy enforcement tool using Open Policy Agent (OPA) - which is a opensource, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project.

But did you know you can validate policies on your Kubernetes manifests before you deploy them on to the cluster? In this post, we will see how we can govern our deployments using Conftest and OPA policy agent.

Keep your workflow actions up to date using GitHub Dependabot

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jan 28, 2022

GitHub Actions is great in automating your workflows. However, as you start using various actions from GitHub Marketplace in your workflow, it will soon become necessary for you to keep the actions up-to-date. Actions might contain security fixes, bug fixes etc and manually keeping track of updates or updating them when a newer version is available is a lot of hassle. This is where we can use Depndabot, which can help by automatically raising PR’s whenever there is a newer version of action is available used in the workflow. In this post, we will see quick way to keep the actions up-to-date using GitHub Dependabot.

Setting up Azure Cosmos DB Emulator on Synology NAS

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jul 27, 2021

Cosmos DB Emulator is great for developing against Azure Cosmos DB in your local environment. If you want to run the emulator on Mac/Linux though, the emulator is now in preview mode at the time of writing this and uses Docker to make it available.

Recently I wanted to setup Cosmos DB Emulator on Mac, but I did not want to set it up such that I keep it running always on my Mac. Instead, I decided to use my Synology NAS to host the emulator directly on my NAS as it is built on Linux and also because it allows the emulator running and available for me all the time.

In this post we will see how to set it up on Synology NAS.

How to publish Helm 3 charts to GitHub Container Registry using GitHub Actions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Apr 10, 2021

I have already written how to publish Helm chart to ACR using Azure DevOps and GitHub actions. But did you know that you can also publish Helm3 charts (or any OCI compliant package) to GitHub Container Registry(GCR)? In this post we will see how to do that.

Publish Helm 3 charts to Azure Container Registry (ACR) using GitHub Actions

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Apr 1, 2021

In my previous post, we briefly covered how to publish a Helm chart to ACR using Azure DevOps. In this post we will use GitHub actions to build and publish Helm chart to ACR using GitHub Actions. We will also take a sneak peak how GitHub environments work.

Helm 3 - CI/CD with Azure DevOps using Azure Container Registry (ACR) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Jan 30, 2021

I have been bit late to Kubernetes world, but ever since I have started using it, I have been part of a great teams building awesome applications and using Helm package manager. With Helm, you package your Kubernetes application as charts, which are then stored in Helm chart repo. Helm also has a templating engine allowing you to set values in your charts dynamically allowing you to manage your applications more easily. Azure Container Registry (ACR) currently supports publishing Helm 3 charts to ACR and it is currently in preview.

In this post we will see how we can publish a sample Helm chart to ACR and also deploy the application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) by consuming the published chart from ACR. We will also use ACR’s repository scoped tokens - a preview feature which offer great benefits.

Quickly switch Kubernetes cluster and namespaces with kubectx and kubens

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 29, 2020

Often when working with Kubernetes you might find yourself switching between your clusters or namespaces. I am doing this numerous times lately and I was slow switching using the regular commands. In this post, I would like to highlight two productivity utilities when working with Kubernetes which will make it simple when working with multiple clusters.

Deploying TIBCO Rendezvous on RedHat Enterprise Linux using Azure DevOps

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 28, 2020

TIBCO Rendezvous (RDV) is one of the popular messaging product for real-time data processing. Predominantly used in Financial corporations to process real-time trading, market data and efficient information flow between control systems. In this post, we will see how we can deploy this messaging application to RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 (on Azure VM) using Azure DevOps.

Troubleshooting Azure DevOps deployment stuck at 'Queued' status

Utkarsh Shigihalli on Dec 12, 2020

Recently one of our customer was trying to deploy to an VM environment using Azure DevOps and all of their deployments were getting stuck at Queued status. To their surprise, they had idle Azure DevOps agents to work on the jobs. After scratching head for couple of hours, the fix was not what I had expected…