Erik Lundevall-Zara’s blog

Quick blog set-up with Quarto and Fly.io

blog
productivity
quarto
fly.io
This is a quick tip to get started to set up your own blog website, similar to the one you are reading now. I have set up a couple of websites with blogs using this…
Mar 19, 2025
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Crafting in Code and Words: Adventures with Helix, Languages, and Writing

productivity
helix
arabic
esperanto
awscdk
pulumi
Somewhere along my developer journey, I’d grown accustomed to complex configurations - tweaking endless dotfiles, maintaining elaborate setups. The allure of infinite…
Feb 5, 2025
Erik Lundevall-Zara

The road to EKS monitoring

prometheus
cloudwatch
kubernetes
eks
aws
Recently, I added integration with Jira for a monitoring solution for AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) that we had set up. This kind of marked a milestone in a journey…
Jan 29, 2025
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Bootstrapping Pulumi Self-Managed Backend

productivity
pulumi
aws
Pulumi IaC is a quite nice infrastructure-as-code tool, and one which I would prefer to use in many cases. For all resources that Pulumi IaC manages, it needs to keep state…
Jan 23, 2025
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Commit 2025

productivity
pulumi
aws
arabic
esperanto
Many people start the new year by setting goals. They plan what to accomplish and how to better themselves. A wise man said “Forget about setting goals, do this instead”.…
Jan 8, 2025
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Simple query utility for Amazon Managed Prometheus

python
aws
prometheus
Recently I had the task to set up an Amazon Managed Prometheus (AMP) workspace. AMP is AWS managed version of Prometheus monitoring solution, primarily the server side that…
Dec 12, 2024
Erik Lundevall-Zara

TWIL: Migrating from CloudFormation to AWS CDK, using Rain

productivity
awscdk
cloudformation
TWIL - This week I learned. This task was actually done two weeks ago, but I thought it could be worth mentioning.
Dec 4, 2024
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Taste of Elixir - part 2

productivity
elixir
In this post, we will continue from part 1 and look at some more features in Elixir. This includes the pipe operator, working with external dependencies in scripts, and anony…
Sep 23, 2024
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Taste of Elixir - part 1

productivity
elixir
In BEAM me up, Elixir I wrote about the BEAM virtual machine and the lovely language Elixir. However, I did not provide any code examples for Elixir. In this post I will…
Sep 11, 2024
Erik Lundevall-Zara

BEAM me up, Elixir

productivity
elixir
erlang
beam
gleam
Sometimes, you just need the right time to appreciate something and get into it properly.
Aug 22, 2024
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Change for productivity and joy

productivity
neovim
tmux
wezterm
A change of laptop resulted in some changes how I work, and also a bit more joy in doing the work, and also on the way to be more productive. This happened.
Jan 24, 2024
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Welcome, joyful developers and grumpy cloud engineers!

news
Welcome to the Cloudgnosis blog!
Dec 15, 2023
Erik Lundevall-Zara

An opinionated AWS CDK project template for Python

aws
awscdk
python
productivity
AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is a nice framework to use if you build infrastructure for AWS. It can be relatively quick to define various types of cloud…
Jul 7, 2023
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Overcoming shortcomings in CloudFormation, using AWS CDK

aws
awscdk
cloudformation
typescript
infrastructure-as-code
Have you sometimes been frustrated over some feature which you can do via AWS Console, or perhaps via AWS CLI or one of the AWS SDKs (Software development Kits), but not via…
May 23, 2023
Erik Lundevall-Zara

From AWS ClickOps to infrastructure-as-software - importing with Pulumi

aws
infrastructure-as-code
pulumi
productivity
Setting up infrastructure through ClickOps, even if we may not admit to it, is often a reality. ClickOps is setting up infrastructure through the web interface of the cloud…
Nov 22, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Testing Pulumi Deployments - deployments mini-challenge

pulumi
aws
devops
infrastructure-as-code
Pulumi is a player in the infrastructure-as-software space that I find really interesting. One of the tools they provide is the Pulumi Service, which is a management…
Nov 16, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to Go with Pulumi YAML

pulumi
aws
go
yaml
This text is kind of continuation of the article “A tale of two tools - Pulumi and AWS CDK”, although it will mainly focus on Pulumi, and write about YAML and Go support for…
Nov 9, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Boost productivity with VS Code dev containers

aws
awscdk
pulumi
productivity
vscode
devcontainers
Have you had situations when you may have many solutions or services, some which may rarely be changed, simply because they work as expected, or there are not much changes…
Oct 31, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

A tale of two tools - Pulumi and AWS CDK

aws
awscdk
pulumi
infrastructure-as-code
Two tools have gained some adoption recently in the infrastructure as software space are Pulumi and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). In this article I am going to…
Oct 25, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to pick an infrastructure as code language

aws
awscdk
cdk8s
cdktf
terraform
opentofu
typescript
python
cue
cloudformation
You can use several languages today to define cloud infrastructure as code. Sometimes, you have a range of languages to choose from, even for a single tool.
Sep 15, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Infrastructure-as-code - where is the customer obsession, AWS?

aws
iac
terraform
pulumi
awscdk
cloudformation
AWS has a problem with its handling of customers’ adoption of infrastructure as code. This applies to CloudFormation, and by extension, to the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS…
May 12, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to set up ad-hoc developer environments

development
nix
productivity
Have you had a task to fix a supposedly simple thing in a project, a code or configuration change, only to spend most of the time to set up the environment so you can do the…
Mar 21, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Understanding configuration complexity

configuration
productivity
infrastructure-as-code
Have you struggled with increasing complexity of managing and maintaining software configuration? Some time ago, I saw a reference to what was called the Configuration…
Mar 7, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Take a cue to supercharge your configurations

configuration
productivity
cue
Do you have a love/hate relationship with YAML or JSON for configurations?
Mar 2, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to migrate from CloudFormation to AWS CDK

aws
awscdk
cloudformation
Have you, at least partially, adopted AWS CloudFormation to have better management of your Cloud Infrastructure?
Feb 3, 2022
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to create awesome repeatable project setups for AWS CDK

aws
awscdk
productivity
typescript
infrastructure-as-code
Are you excited about using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define infrastructure-as-code?
Aug 30, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

7 ways to implement infrastructure as code on AWS

aws
infrastructure-as-code
apprunner
awscdk
terraform
cloudformation
pulumi
awscopilot
It feels daunting, does it not? Infrastructure-as-code promises to provide consistent, reliable, repeatable, and automated infrastructure provisioning and management.
Aug 17, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Why Infrastructure-as-Code Matter to You, Even If You Are Not a Hotshot Developer

aws
automation
productivity
governance-as-code
infrastructure-as-code
What is the deal with infrastructure-as-code, why does it matter to you?
Aug 9, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to simplify project setup with Projen

productivity
typescript
python
aws
Whenever you start a new software project and set up a repository for it, what do you do? Run a package manager tool (npm/yarn init, poetry init, cargo init, etc.) to get…
May 17, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to detect messed up CloudFormation resources - part 2

aws
cloudformation
infrastructure-as-code
powershell
In part 1 we introduced an AWS CloudFormation feature called Drift Detection, with which we can detect (uncontrolled) changes to the resources we manage via CloudFormation.…
May 3, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to detect messed up CloudFormation resources - part 1

aws
cloudformation
infrastructure-as-code
If you use the principles of infrastructure as code to provision your cloud infrastructure, you get many benefits from it - repeatable, quick, and consistent deployments.…
May 2, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

Is AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) right for you?

aws
awscdk
devops
infrastructure-as-code
If you are looking to automate your AWS infrastructure provisioning, you may have heard of AWS Cloud Development Kit or AWS CDK for short. This is one of a multitude of…
Apr 19, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara

How to avoid unexpected AWS costs

aws
powershell
budget
If you are a user of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services, you have most likely run into the situation where you have some resources costing money that came as a…
Apr 7, 2021
Erik Lundevall-Zara
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