Zühlke Camp 2022
What’s this about?
Zühlke Camp is a yearly 4-day workshop/hackathon/nerd-fest where you spend time with your team
in a nice place, learning new stuff you’re interested in 
The Alice team’s camp in 2022 took place in mid-June, in La Tour-de-Peilz 
.
This page gives a brief overview of topics and technologies I looked at during the Camp, and some info about what I learned (mainly to serve as a quick tutorial for myself, when I need to come back and look up something).
What are we looking at?
Goals
The overarching theme for this Camp for me was probably “DevOps”. I wanted to build up infrastructure to get from code to an application running on Kubernetes, in an automated way, using tools I had no (or limited) prior experience with.
Technologies/Tools/Platforms/…
The technologies/tools/platforms/… I wanted to learn were (in no particular order):
-
After having played around with AWS a bit, I was curious what Azure has to offer, and play around with that a bit.
-
Terraform served me well while playing around with AWS, so I wanted to dust off my knowledge and use it again.
-
Using Kubernetes was pretty much a given, so using Helm (which I had also used before) was a rather obvious choice.
-
Instead of using Azure’s own CI/CD tooling, I wanted to take a look at GitHub actions instead, which I hadn’t used before.
-
I try to document stuff using markdown files anyway, so I decided to try out GitHub pages to quickly create a website.
-
After reading an article about Git submodules somewhere shortly before camp, I decided to try it out.
What did I learn?
The results (code, infrastructure definitions, …) of the four days, together with some how-tos and readmes for the technical details, are available in two GitHub repositories:
-
Contains a minimal Spring Boot application that provides a single web endpoint (so that there is something that can actually be built, deployed, and run), the GitHub actions definitions, but also the Helm chart for the application (which is arguably infrastructure and should probably live in the other repo).
-
Contains the Terraform resource definitions. This could just as well be included in the other (main) repo, however, it is a nice self-contained bundle of stuff, so to play around with Git submodules, I decided to put it into its own repo.
Azure
Overall pretty similar to AWS, with the notable exception of Azure AD. Which was probably the biggest stumbling block for me during the whole camp. Compared to AWS IAM (which feels relatively straightforward), Azure AD definitely sucked.
Service users (e.g. for Terraform) need an Application, which in turn needs a Service Principal. Roles are then assigned to the Service Principal (limited to a Scope).
Maybe this whole thing feels more natural to system admin folks with AD experience, but from a developer perspective (with no prior AD experience), AWS feels more logical.
Terraform
Still a nice tool Different providers for “normal” Azure and Azure AD were a bit surprising,
but that is only a minor technical detail, apart from that there were no surprises.
Helm
I basically just did a helm create, made some minimal changes to some of the auto-generated
files, and then helm install-ed stuff. So very limited use of helm during the camp, mainly due
to time constraints.
GitHub actions
Building a Spring Boot Java application, creating a container image using that application, and uploading the image into an Azure Container Registry worked like a charm. Having only used Jenkins as a CI tool before, this felt so much more comfortable.
GitHub pages
This one was pretty much an afterthought, and I didn’t have time to do it during the camp. It seems easy enough, though, so the page you’re looking at was added after the camp, to provide at least some documentation.
And because nothing ever works on the first try, here’s how to fix the GitHub pages problem where the page cannot be deployed because there is already a deployment in progress: gist :octocat:
Git submodules
Git’s submodule feature was also only used in the most rudimentary way, to add the infrastructure repo containing the terraform resource definitions as a submodule to the main repo.
No changes were pushed from the main repo into the infrastructure repo through the submodule, though, so that is still something I need to try out.
Conclusions
Overall, this was one of the best camps I’ve been to. Very nice location, great vibe, and
(probably a first) I managed to look at and achieve all of (or at least most of) what I had in mind
for the Camp 