DigitalOcean

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets (you are here) The Before Architecture Here’s what I was running before this project started: ...

Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call (you are here) Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Moment I Noticed I’ve been running everything in DigitalOcean since I decided to ditch my home equipment years ago. The appeal was “set it and forget it” – no hardware failures at 2 AM, no power outages taking down my sites, no maintaining physical boxes. And for years, it worked. My bill hovered around $125/month and I didn’t think twice about it. ...

Update (January 2026): The package versions in this tutorial were current as of March 2024. While the concepts and approach remain valid, you should check for newer versions of the tools mentioned (Hadolint, Terrascan, pre-commit hooks, etc.). Most importantly, update actions/checkout@v3 to actions/checkout@v4 in your workflows - v3 uses deprecated Node.js 16. As I continue this series on CI/CD pipeline security, it is time to now work on securely building and deploying our application. This post picks up where my Build Secure Python Pipelines: Adding Tests and Hooks in Action post left off. ...

In my Silence Not Golden: Fixing the Mute Button on Tetragon Logs post, I realized that I was an idiot. I also realized that I needed to get all of my Kubernetes into one place for a number of reasons. I’m most familiar with Splunk so it makes sense to centralize my Kubernetes logs with Splunk. In this post, I’m going to walk through configuring Splunk and Kubernetes so that all of my logs are in a central location. I’m not going to include setting up a Splunk instance so I’ll assume that you have deployed Splunk in Cloud or some version of Enterprise. ...

I previously blogged about Starboard and How to Install and Use Starboard to Protect Your Kubernetes Cluster. These articles were focused more on vulnerability and configuration management. Now, I wanted to focus my attention on runtime security observability using Tetragon. Getting Started With Tetragon The first step is to install it. The Tetragon website recommends using Helm 3 to deploy it so that’s what we’ll do. I’m deploying with just the default values for now ...