Rebuilding my homelab from scratch, part 1 - Bash and Terraform
Bash scripts and a Terraform wrapper to rebuild my Proxmox homelab.
Richard Nye
Google changed the way it crawls our site - and exposed several Azure Front Door misconfigurations
How an undocumented Google crawl location change caused a drastic drop-off in crawl rate on an Azure Front Door site — and the three fixes that resolved it
Using AI as an Azure FinOps agent to reduce Azure spend
Using AI as an Azure FinOps agent to find under-utilised Azure resources, misconfigurations, and inefficiencies to reduce Azure annual cost by £2k.
Setting up Azure MCP Server with Service Principal
How to configure Azure MCP Server with Claude Desktop using a service principal for least-privilege access, including app registration and RBAC.
The Four Things I did to Fix Alert Fatigue
Four changes that cut Azure alert noise: refined KQL queries, actionable thresholds, replacing email notifications, and ensuring every alert demands a response.
Improving CI/CD Part 1
Decoupling CI from CD, versioning releases with GitHub Actions run numbers, and fixing Ansible idempotency — four improvements to a homelab pipeline.
Terraform Design Patterns Part 1
Comparing Terraform strategies for managing multiple environments: branches, separate repos, directories, and remote state with separate S3 backend keys.
Testing AWS RDS with PostgreSQL Restore
Setting up AWS RDS with PostgreSQL, fixing VPC inbound rules and pgAdmin SSL errors, and restoring a homelab database backup to the cloud.
First Kubernetes Deployment of an ASP.NET Core App
A first Kubernetes deployment of an ASP.NET Core app on k3s: manifests, Ingress, Secrets, ConfigMaps, and the mistakes made along the way.
Lessons from Early Terraform Mistakes
Three beginner Terraform mistakes fixed: hardcoded cloud-init credentials, inflexible child modules, and mixed environments — with solutions for each.