How to reuse Actions from another private repo using GitHub Actions

With GitHub, it’s easy to create Actions and use them in GitHub Workflow as long as they are accessible from a public repository. This blog post shows you how to use Actions from a private repository.

How to access Terraform modules in another private repo using GitHub Actions

Having Terraform modules in a separate repo is a common practice to easily reuse modules over projects. But what’s the best way to get access to this private repo using GitHub Actions.

.NET Core 6 gRPC running in Kubernetes with healthcheck

Health checks (probes) are a powerful feature of Kubernetes and make sure your container is healthy. A separate endpoint, next to your regular endpoint, tells using an HTTP status code if your service is healthy or not. You decide the implementation of the check that is executed. Let’s see what needs to be done implementing a .NET 6 gRPC health check.

.NET Core 6 gRPC running in Kubernetes with Traefik

gRPC is ideal for communication between microservices. gRPC has performance advantages through the Protobuf message structure. gRPC is intended for internal systems due to its limited low browser support. Therefore very suitable to use within Kubernetes. It’s the recommended way from Microsoft to build RPC services using .NET.

Access KeyVault from Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with an ASP.NET Core application using a Managed Identity

Secrets in Kubernetes are not really secret. You should store all your cloud-related secrets in a vault anyway, so why not access this vault from your Kubernetes cluster. If you are using Azure, Azure KeyVault is the most logical place to store your secrets. This blogpost tells you how to access the KeyVault from an ASP.NET Core application running on AKS.

Collection of handy Azure CLI and Bash scripts

More and more people are using the Azure CLI to provision resources on Azure. Since my blogpost about the Azure CLI, I received so many reactions of people who are using the Azure CLI now. It’s readable, easy and is idempotent. Sometimes you want to use the more advanced syntax. This blog post is a collection of Azure CLI Commands and bash scripts that took me more time then I wanted and collect them so it doesn’t take you that much time (and me as well, next time 🙂 ). I will add to this blogpost if necessary.

“Backdoor” in Azure DevOps to get the password of a Service Principal

The password of a Service Principal configured in Azure DevOps in a Service Connection is a secret and hidden. But it’s fairly easy to get the password of a Service Principal in Azure DevOps. It’s not a security bug or a backdoor. It’s a side effect and by design. It looks like leaving the keys in the keyhole. This blogpost tells you how to get the password. As soon as you can use Service Principal credentials, it’s possible to connect to Azure from any laptop, you don’t have to be using a laptop in the same domain as the company. An additional advantage is that you can use the tools you love and that make you productive.

Have a great looking terminal and a more effective shell with Oh my Zsh using powerlevel10k on WSL 2 using Windows

Now Git, the Azure CLI, and Kubernetes Kubectl are used more and more, the bash prompt is one of the most productive ways to do your daily work. When using Windows, the usage of WSL (2) is a must-have when it comes to having a Linux shell to execute bash scripts. This works nice but with Oh-My-Zsh you can make the command-prompt look- and behave better so you can do your work more efficient.

Read Azure docs always in en-us instead of local language

Searching in Google for Azure related stuff results in a lot of links to local language specific content. For example in my case the url always contains nl-nl. Despite the language configuration in Chrome is English I always get results in Dutch. This is very annoying and can be solved using Chrome Extension Requestly.

Stop using ARM templates! Use the Azure CLI instead

I was a big fan of ARM templates: for many years I’m applying ARM templates on a large number of projects for all kinds of customers. I’ve written articles and blog posts about ARM templates. Have given many workshops and started collecting ARM templates used in enterprises ready for production.  I’ve written the Best practices with ARM Templates article together with my colleague Peter Groenewegen, which is the most visited blog post of Xpirit and it’s also published by Microsoft. It’s clear I was a big fan of ARM templates. But times are changing.