Sovereignty: Core infrastructure

We’ve forgotten how to build things ourselves. The public cloud is like a dealer: you pay for what you need, when you need it. It’s very convenient, but you’re trapped. Trapped in their ecosystem, their rules, their pricing, their price bumps. Escaping that trap requires some serious planning. It’s about answering the hard questions: What hardware do you use? What do you repurpose, what do you buy? Which stack do you trust? Continue reading

Sovereignty: the first steps

The 1984 Apple commercial is legendary! A young girl throws a hammer into a screen, breaking the control of corporate power. When I started writing this blog about sovereignty, that image popped into my head. Sovereignty, or digital sovereignty, is a term we hear a lot these days. What does it actually mean? And why is everyone talking about it? At first, I thought it was just about making sure personal data doesn’t fall under the US Cloud Act, which allows the US government to access it. Continue reading

Revamping my blog in a changing world

The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. Not only technologically, but also geopolitically. As a kid, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s — a time when tensions between the West and the East were high, with both sides threatening to obliterate each other using nuclear missiles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, East and West found more common ground, and the fear of mutual destruction began to fade. Continue reading

The Art of Conversation

In the 1990’s when I did my bachelor in computer science, teachers told us that we would be replaced by 4GL languages. Languages in which end-users would describe how applications should work. At that time we laughed at them, saying we saw the exact opposite. Oh dear, we were right. Code became complexer, new concepts arrived on the horizon and software development matured. Fast forward to the 2020’s… Over the last year, I’ve been giving a lot of GitHub Copilot training sessions world wide. Continue reading

Quick tip: Get in control by using your GitHub context

GitHib actions and workflows are very powerful by nature. They help me to build and deploy my Azure environments, without having me to do all the tedious and errorprone work. I create a pull request, have it peer reviewed and once approved my environments are provisoned the way I envisioned it. This is also the case at my current assignment for a large organization. Last year the organization decided that a new change management system (which name I refuse to pronounce) should handle all changes. Continue reading

Quick tip: Find permissions in RBAC roles easily

When building infrastructures in Azure, you sometimes come to a point in which you need to add an additional action to a RBAC role in order to access certain Azure resources. In our case we needed to add read permissions on the Front Door activity logs to an internal security administrator role. The way I used to do it, was browing MS-learn to can find a comprehensive list of built-in roles. Continue reading

Where is that documentation? A tale on setting up diagnostic settings...

I’m a big fan of Azure and building infrastructure on it using IaC (Infrastructure as Code) and deploy it through pipelines (Azure DevOps) or workflows (Github). The last two years, I primarily used Bicep to build the infrastructure. This is often a very satisfying experience but in some cases it can be quite frustrating. Frustrating because I can’t find the information that I need in the MS Learn documentation at the location where I would expect it to be. Continue reading