Blog - kimserey lam

Nov 09, 2018

Monitor Nginx Access Log In Cloudwatch

Last week we saw how we could Setup CloudWatch to push logs from our application to CloudWatch. Apart from the application logs, another type of logs that is worth looking into are the access logs from Nginx. Nginx being the entrypoint of the application, every traffic in and out goes through it and today we will see how we can leverage its access logs to monitor the response time of our application from CloudWatch.

Nov 02, 2018

Output Serilog To Cloudwatch

Few weeks ago we saw How to configure Serilog to work with different environment. At the end of the post, we saw briefly how to get the structured logs synced to Cloudwatch. Today we will explore the configuration in more details.

Oct 26, 2018

Nginx Basic Authentication

Basic authentication provides an easy way to password protect an endpoint on our server. Today we will see how we can create a password file and use it to enable basic authentication on Nginx.

Oct 19, 2018

Gitlab Pipeline Artifacts And Environments

Almost a year ago I wrote about how we could setup CI/CD with gitlab pipeline. I showed a very simple 3 stages pipeline build/test/deploy. Since then Gitlab has improved considerably their CI tool with features simplifying releases management. Today we will revisit pipelines and introduce few concepts which will help in managing releases.

Oct 12, 2018

Local Jenkins With Docker

CI/CD pipelines allow us to automatically build, test and deploy code changes. With Jenkins pipeline, the pipeline itself is generated from a file called the Jenkinsfile which, usually, is source controlled together with the source code repository. When we need to push new changes, what we would usually do, is test locally and then commit to the repository. From there, the Jenkins pipeline will trigger and build, test on the integration server and deploy to a testable environment (DEV/QA). But what do we do when the changes that we are making are on the Jenkinsfile itself? How do we test locally the validity of the Jenkinsfile or more simply, how do we try on a sandbox a Jenkins pipeline to learn how to write a Jenkinsfile? Today we will see how we can setup a sandbox with a full CI/CD deployment which can be quickly brought up and teared down for testing.

Oct 05, 2018

Docker Compose Sqlserver

Last week we saw how we could install and run an ASP NET Core application in a container, we saw how Visual Studio uses docker-compose to setup our services. Today we will see how we can use compose to setup a cluster composed by an ASP NET Core application container with a SQL Server container and how we can place in a third party process.

Sep 28, 2018

Docker Aspnetcore

Few weeks ago we saw how we could run ASP NET Core application on Ubuntu. This proving that a .NET Core Application can run on a Linux system, today we will be taking it a step further and see how we can deploy our application in a Docker Linux container.

Sep 21, 2018

Appveyor

Last week we saw a flow to manage versioning and releases. As a continuation of last week, today I will show how we can setup versioning and releases for open source projects by configuring Appveyor and using FAKE to setup a build script.

Sep 14, 2018

Versioning In Open Source Libraries

Few weeks ago I explained how Gitversion can be used to apply semantic versioning to projects based on commit and tag history. Today I will dive deeper in the purpose of versioning and introduce a flow which can be followed to version open source project libraries by looking into four important parts in the lifecycle of an open source library.

Sep 07, 2018

Polly Httpclient Resilience In Dotnet

Few weeks ago I explained [how to use the new HttpClientFactory. This freed ourselves from managing the confusing lifecycle of a HttpClient and at the same time allowed us to setup commmon options like base address for all HttpClient injections in our classes. Today we will see how we can setup timeout and retry policies for the HttpClient in in ASP NET Core using Polly.

Aug 31, 2018

Infrastructure Continuous Deployment

Few weeks ago we saw how we could Setup continious integration and deployment to deploy an application using Gitlab Pipeline. We configured a service with systemd and had an ASP NET Core application automatically deployed when code was pushed to the repository. This automation allows us to reduce interaction with the server and reducing the manual work. The “infrastructure” configurations like systemd service files and nginx site files must also be created or edited on the server therefore it makes sense to also have them automatically deployed. On top of that, it makes even more sense to have them save in repository and source controlled. Today we will see how we can leverage Gitlab Pipeline to setup a continuous deployment for our infrastructure files.

Aug 24, 2018

Nginx Debugging With Mitmproxy

In previous blog posts, we saw how to proxy requests to an ASP NET Core application using Nginx. We saw that request headers also can be proxied with proxy_set_header In order to ease development, we need to be able to debug the values to verify that they are what we expect. Today we will see two methods to inspect the proxied requests.

Aug 17, 2018

Sdk Projects And Assets Json

Last week I encountered an issue with MSBuild while trying to run it from command line. The issue did not appear when using VisualStudio right click + build but only appeared when using msbuild.exe CLI directly with a clean project.

Aug 10, 2018

Aspnetcore 2.1 Apicontroller

ASP NET Core 2.1 brings a set a enhacements for Web API development, Web API being a service accessible via HTTP and returning result in Json format. Those enhancements aim to simplify the composition of those APIs and also remove unecessary functionalities. Today we will explore those enhancements.

Aug 03, 2018

Update Npm Packages With Ncu

Frontend libraries progress very rapidly. After just one month, a project can see all its packages needing an upgrade. Today we will see how we can figure which packages need to be updated and how to do it.