One problem you’ll sometimes encounter when working with cloud services from AWS, Azure or Google cloud is that developing locally can be made more difficult when working with services that do not have a standardized interface with an implementation readily available for local installation. For instance, when working with a pub/sub system that is compatible with Kafka you can just install a minimal Kafka cluster locally and all is good. But what to do when the APIs offered by the service you need are not standardized? That’s when emulators come in. In the rest of this post I’m going to focus on Azure, since that’s what I’m working with most often.

I run a few of my workloads on VMs in Azure. Some of them deal with data and content that changes over time, and accordingly I like to have the data backed up periodically. Microsoft provides the AzCopy tool for uploading files to Azure blob storage alright, and it works very well with managed identities assigned to VMs (and other services in Azure).

But some of the same properties that apply to data also apply to the backups of that data: their value diminishes over time, so keeping backups for an extended amount of time is pointless. Accordingly, I always want to delete old backups after some time.

I’ve been running a honeypot for a while just to see what creepy things crawl around on the internet. One of the things I wanted to see is what credentials are probed when trying to sign in, so I equipped the honeypot with a fake WordPress login page.

Today, I’m writing about these credentials. For my evaluation I’m looking at data only from the past 6 months, more or less. On average, almost 80 attempts to login are made every day. Needless to say that for the honeypot, all attempts to login fail - there’s really nothing to login to.

One of the things I like about golang (and Rust too, by the way) is that it’s quite simple to build really small container images by statically linking the executables, and using scratch as the base image. I’ve done this a few times in the past, and was doing it again just recently. Except that this time around, I ran into issues: the container would crash soon after it started.

I’ve wanted to get rid of Wordpress for a while now. It’s more of a hassle than anything else, really. And who on earth still uses PHP? Anyway, a while ago I embarked on the journey to find a good replacement. First, I looked at other CMS systems that are similar to Wordpress, but soon realized that they’d all require me to keep them up-to-date all the time, and they’d likely be just about as annoying. At the same time, I’ve gotten so used to creating web content using markdown, that I hoped I could find something where markdown indeed plays a significant role in building the content. In addition, being a developer at heart, I was hoping to also find something with a decent version control system for history and rollbacks (whenever necessary) and the likes.

I’ve wanted to find a good provider of cheap and secure cloud backups for a while. I’ve compared some cloud drive providers, but didn’t quite like those. They usually have very limited free plans, somewhat pricey paid plans (e.g. 50GB for about 24$ a year for OneDrive), or like in the case of Google no information available at all. By the way, “Google one is coming soon” isn’t an announcement that I want to look at for more than a few days when looking for pricing info. Then, I’ve looked at pricing of cloud storage providers, such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Those offer storage around 1 cent ($0.01) per GB per month. That’s a quarter of the OneDrive cost! It’s even less if you consider their archive offerings (AWS Glacier, Archive in Azure, Coldline Storage for Google). The cheapest offering here is from Microsoft at 0.2 cents ($0.002) per GB per month, but with some usage caveats. Since the point of backups is to keep them for a long time, this quickly adds up though. Now I’ve written a line or two of code before, so I figured I could as well write my own tool for this. So here is bart, the backup and restore tool. Note that at this point I do not offer bart as a ready-to-use executable, but only as MIT-licensed source code. In addition, bart currently works only with Azure Blob Storage - or with storage mounted into the machine’s file system. However, adding other cloud providers/archive destinations should be relatively easy, given the interfaces used in the tool.