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Just in time for the public holiday in Germany, the Solidblocks infrastructure components collection got another addition. solidblocks-dns is a Kotlin library that lets you interact with the Hetzner DNS API to easily manage DNS zones and records.

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One of the main benefits of using infrastructure-as-code is the reproducibility of your environments. No matter what happens, you can wipe everything away and rebuild from scratch. Like with many things, practice is required to ensure that the bootstrap capability is not lost over time. Typically, you will want to regularly wipe and rebuild your test (or development) environment to prevent cyclic dependencies from creeping in, ensuring that your bootstrapping code still functions as intended. [Read More]

As time goes by and a project grows, ideas and concepts that initially seemed like good and pragmatic solutions can sometimes deteriorate into a convoluted mess. Recently, implementing a small feature in the Solidblocks infrastructure suite went from a pleasant Friday afternoon coding session to an integration testing nightmare, caused by an overabundance of infrastructure testing approaches.

This post will highlight the different approaches and offer a streamlined solution that will work indefinitely (until it doesn’t :-)).

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Providing test utility classes or test fixtures for other projects in Gradle environments can be an annoying and cumbersome endeavor. Often the solutions involve the creation of extra projects to provide the needed testing functionality for other modules or projects, or include manipulation of Gradle source sets and configurations. This post shows how to achieve this using functionality that is already included in Gradle and Junit.

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I just want to parse a timestamp on the JVM If you are in a hurry and just want to know which JVM (Java/Kotlin) library can parse which date formats look –>here<– for an overview. Alternatively, read on when you want to know why this page exists… But Why? I have been developing software on the JVM platform roughly 20 years now. Every now and then, I need to parse a date from its text representation into the seconds since epoch or just to have it as an object to do some date arithmetics. [Read More]

Solidblocks RDS PostgreSQL is a ready to use, all-batteries included Terraform module for deploying PostgreSQL databases to the Hetzner cloud. It is part of the Solidblocks library, which is a collection of reusable components for infrastructure operation, automation and developer experience. And it has a performance issue. The typical uses case until now was a simple and cheap PostgreSQL database for smaller workloads that do not see a lot of traffic and only need a single node database with reliable backup and restore. [Read More]

An often overlooked and admittedly cumbersome topic when developing infrastructure as code (IaC), is the testing of the resources that were created from said infrastructure code. Even a simple setup like a VM that is spun up in some cloud to serve HTTP requests, already confronts us with some obstacles to overcome. A pragmatic approach for testing such a setup could be to ensure that after deployment of the VM the HTTP port answers with a success HTTP code (2xx). [Read More]

If you are part of a platform team or develop libraries or SDKs that are used by other people, a small detail from my previous post of the developer experience series might have caught your eye.

There may be a README.MD somewhere with information […], but this information tends to get outdated very fast

This problem gets increasingly worse when you use your documentation to provide code samples that illustrate how to use the platform, the library or the SDK that you provide.

Maintaining those code snippets is a tedious task, and they get outdated when the platform or library/SDK evolves. Also, it would be nice to be able to ensure, that the code in the documentation is always tested and guaranteed to run.

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This post is a part of my series about project developer experience, for the other posts have a look here. A fully functional example with all snippets from this post that can be used as a template is available here, more ready to use functions for writing do files are part of my open source project Solidblocks. Imagine you join a new project and are given your first task to fix a longstanding bug. [Read More]

After years of shifting workloads to the big cloud providers like AWS or Azure, I am now more often confronted with situations where the deployed cloud infrastructures become unmanageable cost and complexity wise. A nice, fast and inexpensive alternative for smaller projects is the Hetzner Cloud featuring all basic needed building blocks like VMs, block devices, networking, firewalls and load-balancers. One major drawback with Hetzner is though, that there is no pendant to the AWS RDS service family, meaning we have to start to self-manage our state (and backups) again. [Read More]