I would like to start recapping what I’ve done the previuos month. I’m fortunate enough to have a job where I often delving into new technologies and sometimes it’s hard to remember what technologies I’ve been playing with.

Terraform

At Buildstuff last year I attended a session hosted by James Nugent and Paul Stack on Terraform. I was very impressed and when I got back I managed to convince my team that we should use it.

We started in January and now we convert our AWS configurations to Terraform every time we touch an in-terraformed project. It have been a very nice experience and the number to “Oh we forgot to add permissions to this service in production” have been declining. Of course there have been some bumps along the road, but over all I’m very impressed.

If you do anything on AWS you must use Terraform! I hope to pick up an Azure project soon and try it there also.

GitlabCI

In combination with Terraform I have done quite a lot for work with GitlabCI and it’s also quite nice. The Docker implementation is also very good. There are still some missing features, but every month some of the gaps are closed.

.NET core

Finally I’ve had my first go at .net core (dotnet core? - when googling it seems to be dotnet core) in combination with AWS Lambda. It’s nice to come back to C#, but the whole mess about versions and project.json is a pain. It seems like it’s getting better and we are nearing some stability and version 2.0 will be quite nice, but for now it’s very confusing. And of course AWS Lambda only support 1.0…

But it feels very much like living in the future when you:

• Write the .Net code in VS Code
• Commit to Gitlab
• GitlabCI starts a Linux docker container up and compiles your code.
• Another container runs terraform and deploys the configuration
• To AWS lambda

It was not easy getting up and running, but very neat now.