posts

Roughly four years ago, I have fallen in love with Syncthing. First, it was just a partial replacement for Dropbox. More and more, it grew to be the “data backbone” of my private life. Recently, I needed to change my Syncthing setup to a Kubernetes-based Syncthing deployment. So, this article shows how to deploy Syncthing on a Kubernetes cluster with a distributed storage—in my case, this is a three node k3s cluster running Ceph via Rook.

Recently, I have been giving a talk to students at TU Berlin about Cloud-native engineering and software architecture as a part of Prof. Tai’s lecture “Cloud Native Engineering and Architecture”. I explained to the students the approach to software architecture and engineering that my team and me are following. From a 10,000 feet perspective, we are developing an Event-Driven Microservices Architecture to build a customer-first product based on a Cloud-native platform. But there is much more in the background such as the concepts of Minimum Viable Product, Minimum Viable Architecture, etc. that is essential to building such a customer-first product the way we do. This article summarizes the essential points of the talk, connects topics to some of my previous articles, and provides further insights into some core concepts we use.

In an article about why technology matters more and more for companies, Gary O’Brien and Mike Mason mention Continous Delivery (CD) and applied DevOps practices as one of five key factors for a company’s (future) success [8]. Also, Jon Moore and Marty Cagan write in [8] and [8] about the importance of changing the how you build and deploy. To sum it up, it is essential to establish a fast and incremental/iterative software delivery approach to be successful in developing software products. The famous Four Key Metrics can help you to direct your efforts into the right direction. This article is about my lessons learned to implement a proper CD, using up-to-date DevOps practices, and implementing the Four Key Metrics to get to development excellence.

In August/October 2021, we have begun to build a completely new web application which aimed to be a substitution for a former application. When we have started to plan the new application, it was already clear that we wanted to go towards an event-driven application. This article summarizes my impressions and learnings from building this event-driven microservices application in recent months.

Recently, I have been asked about what software architecture review processes exist to steer architecture work. An architecture review aims at different goals such as finding software design issues early in the development before they get costly. Architecture review processes, for example, formalize different steps. They, furthermore, define input and output to/from architecture reviews. This article describes the different architecture review process approaches.

Recently, my Raspberry Pi and the attached hard drive crashed. Both, I am using as a network attached storage for storing a lot of my data. Fortunately, I was able to restore most of the data. As a lesson-learned from that incident, I started to look out for a backup solution for my freshly set up Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Buster). This post is my howto for setting up backups with Duplicity using AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) as the remote backup destination on Raspbian Buster built from source with Python 3 and Boto3.

Welcome to my site. I am Steffen. Here, I will try to blog a little bit about different personal experiences, will share tutorials and howto’s about things I am interested in, etc. Let’s see…