Azure Functions on Container Apps

Recently, I created my first video about Azure Functions on Azure Container Apps, which you can find below. I also made a GitHub repository where you can find the source code, allowing you to set up the Azure Functions on ACA yourself.

June 18, 2024 · 1 min · Arash Jalalat
Website design

Deploy VM instance with GCP and Terraform

You probably are wondering how this website is built and where it is hosted. Maybe you already find out the answer to the first question. This website is powered by Ghost. Ghost is a free and open source blogging platform. They have 2 versions, one managed and one self-hosted. I opted for the self-hosted solution since I usually like to deep dive into IT related projects. Also I wanted to learn how to deploy a blogging website to a self-hosted platform. My blog represents my company AJTech Consulting. This blog is hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and deployed via Terraform (which is an Infrastructure as Code tool) into Docker containers. A container running the Ghost engine, one running the MySQL database and a container running the reverse proxy with Traefik. A reverse proxy is a server that accepts a request from a client and then forwards the request to another server. So basically it sits in front of backend applications. To keep the containers up-to-date and receive important updates I regularly run a script on the Linux VM. ...

August 22, 2023 · 6 min · Arash Jalalat

Use ChatGPT UI with your own API key

ChatGPT has become increasingly popular in recent months. At the time of writing, version 3.5 is in active use by the public and the even more advanced version 4 is being integrated by large companies such as Microsoft. Compared to ChatGPT-3.5 the latest version is able to process a much larger input, up to 25.000 words and makes fewer mistakes called ‘hallucinations’. The most convenient way to get started with ChatGPT is to register as a new user on the OpenAI website for free. However, a major drawback is the lack of performance when using the official ChatGPT UI platform with the free account. That’s a pity, because the strength of ChatGPT is the speed of generating a response. There are several options to take advantage of the high speed. You can either subscribe to ChatGPT and use a paid plan for $24 p/m or you can get started yourself by using an API key in combination with a self-hosted, open source, user interface. ...

April 9, 2023 · 3 min · Arash Jalalat

How to secure passwords with gopass on multiple devices?

When we work with data we can use different ways of security. For my own project where I often use scripts on Linux machines, I figured out how to keep passwords safe. I used gopass. This is an open source UNIX password manager that uses gpg and version control with git. This means that passwords are encrypted and decrypted with gpg while keeping all the changes in a Git repository. This makes it very very flexible, because a git clone can always be made in case a new machine needs to be set up or if several devices want to use the password manager. If you are comfortable with the command-line interface keep reading, because we are going to execute multiple commands! I’m going to demonstrate these commands on a Linux (Debian OS) machine, but feel free to use another system. ...

March 18, 2023 · 5 min · Arash Jalalat