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Cloudflare Tunnel replacing traditional load balancer

Killing the Load Balancer: Cloudflare Tunnel Replaces $22/Month of Infrastructure

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 (you are here) 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 What Was Left After the Static Site Migration After moving all static sites to Cloudflare Pages, the only thing left going through the DigitalOcean App Platform and Load Balancer was n8n – my workflow automation tool at automation.shellnetsecurity.com. ...

April 24, 2026 · 7 min · Scott

Hardening Your CI/CD: Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes Security

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. ...

March 1, 2024 · 11 min · Scott

Securing Your CI/CD Pipeline: A Beginner’s Guide to Implementing Essential Security Measures

If you take a look at this blog, you’ll see that I’ve begun to tinker with devops quite a bit. If you’ve ever taken the trouble to look me up on LinkedIn, you’ll also see that I’ve had a little history doing security stuff. Given my love of security, the next logical step of my devops journey was to start to look into securing the CI/CD pipeline. My previous posts were some ways that I was able to make my own personal infrastructure easier to maintain while at the same time learning various devops tools. My two previous posts, How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Your Database and Automate Your Database Changes with a CI/CD Pipeline, are my attempt at creating a sample pipeline to be used as a basis of my examples. In addition to these articles, I’ve also created some other infrastructure as part of my devops environment. Now let’s secure it! ...

November 16, 2023 · 13 min · Scott

Automate Your Database Changes with a CI/CD Pipeline

I first started talking about building a database CI/DI pipeline in my previous post, How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Your Database. That previous post was focused more on the infrastructure that would be managed by the DevOps team. Now I want to focus on efficient database management with CI/CD. In this post, I’m going to setup a very simple repo that will make use of my deployed database. This new repo is going to leverage a popular tool called Liquibase to implement our changes to the database. ...

November 8, 2023 · 10 min · Scott

How to Build a CI/CD Pipeline for Your Database

I thought that it would be a good idea to do a quick blog post on how to build a ci/cd database pipeline. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve done quite a bit of tinkering with various automation tools. One thing that I’ve found is that automation helps to relieve me of redundant tasks. I’m able to free myself up for other work and try to automate more. Another benefit of automation is that others can leverage what you’ve created. This helps to make sure things are reproducible and consistent. ...

November 6, 2023 · 13 min · Scott