🚀 World Domination Weekly #7: GitOps, Grafana, and Glorious DevOps Chaos
Hey friends,
It’s been a wild week in the land of YAML, dashboards, and CI/CD pipelines. Between late-night debugging sessions and moments of sheer brilliance (or rage?), I’ve pushed forward on multiple fronts in my World Domination plan. Let’s break it down:
🔧 DevOps Sample Projects: From Boring to Boss-Level
I scrapped my basic CI/CD sample and went full-send on a real-world multi-stage deployment lab using:
FastAPI + PostgreSQL in Docker
Azure DevOps Pipelines with promotion from Dev → Staging → Prod
Key Vault Integration and variable groups for secure secrets
Automated Tests + Coverage Reports + Manual Approvals
Yes, it slaps.
📈 AKS Monitoring IaC Lab:
Now With Grafana Sauce
My AKS Bicep lab just leveled up:
Modularized Bicep templates: network.bicep, aks.bicep, grafana.bicep, etc.
Integrated Azure Managed Prometheus + Managed Grafana
Automated dashboards showing workload metrics
GitHub Actions CI for template validation
Optional Defender and Flux modules (because security never sleeps)
Final touches included a custom Grafana dashboard, CI pipeline, and killer README.
🔗 Repo: aks-monitoring-iac-lab
🕹️ Side Quests and Shenanigans
Updated my Connect 4 React game with animations, GitHub Actions CI, and visual polish
Shared project progress on LinkedIn — not viral, but consistent
Started laying the groundwork for my Terraform Azure Lab, because IaC never sleeps
🧠 What I Learned
GitOps is powerful but requires clean module contracts
CI/CD isn’t done until you’ve linted, tested, gated, and screamed into the void
DevOps branding is a long game — consistency > clout chasing
🧪 Coming Up Next
Wrap Terraform Azure Infra Lab with remote backend and GitHub Actions validation
Blog deeper dives into each project, not just highlight reels
Get serious about AZ-400 prep. No more pretending.
🗣️ Final Thought
Even if you don’t get likes or claps every time you ship… the work stacks. The confidence builds. And World Domination continues. 🧠🌍
If you’re on your own DevOps journey, keep showing up. Keep building. Keep learning.
— Nick 👨🏻💻