Fedora on Scaleway Dedibox with bootc

 March 31, 2025

For a while now, I’ve been looking into optimizing and reorganizing some of the infrastructure that powers my self-hosting services. After evaluating a few alternatives, Scaleway’s Dedibox lineup caught my attention: it is a European company with good hardware and decent pricing.

However, as with every good solution, it is not perfect. Scaleway does not provide Fedora as an OS option for their Dedibox machines. They offer a decent selection, including Rocky Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu — but no Fedora. Now, if you know me, you know that Fedora is not just my distro of choice — it’s the one I trust for both personal and professional projects.

A bad year for open source databases

 December 31, 2024

Although the definitions of Open Source are related to specific software characteristics (i.e., the license), the reality is much more complex. Open-source is way more related to a social contract that the software’s creator and its users morally sign than the definition might lead you to believe. This social contract’s key aspect concerns the software’s current license and the licenses of future versions. This is because although users of open-source software usually do not pay to use it, they incur high costs to do so. Examples of those costs are training costs and potential costs to replace a certain technology should it become unavailable in the future.

Hyperscalers are not serious about Service Level Agreements (SLA)

 November 30, 2024

I often talk with people about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in public cloud contexts, and I discover that their idea of what those SLAs are is often distorted.

I believe SLAs need to be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism. In reality, they often provide little meaningful recourse when things go awry. There are two big issues, in my opinion, with the SLA provided by many companies, including the hyperscalers:

On being the cheapest cloud

 September 30, 2024

Recently, I heard a pitch from a public cloud company. Among other characteristics, a key aspect they stressed is that they are the cheapest cloud. This aspect struck me. Not because I believe it is or is not, but because I’ve heard many companies pitch themselves as the cheapest cloud over the years. I asked the CTO if they were foreseeing consistent and planned cuts in the pricing every year or so. The CTO’s answer was very sensible but negative on the specific point. Later the same day, I was thinking more about my interaction with that CTO, and it became clear to me why pitching to be the cheapest cloud is not a good idea.

Private clouds do not need to be legacy!

 February 4, 2024 -  Bruxelles, BE

È possibile creare private cloud di successo!

 November 13, 2023 -  Milano, IT

Google Professional Cloud Architect

 October 4, 2023

As it happens every couple of years, my Google Cloud Certifications were up for renewal at the end of August. I started to look for possible exam dates at the beginning of June since it is possible to renew Google Cloud exams only from the 60th day before the expiration to the 30th day after the expiration date. Since the system informed me that I was outside the 60-day window, I assumed I had to wait until 60 days before the expiration to book the exam. So I waited. The day arrived and passed, and still, I was not able to book my exams. After a few tickets opened to both Google and Kryterion, they informed me that they unblocked my Google Professional Cloud Architect exam, while for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer, more time to unblock it was needed. I, therefore, took the Google Professional Cloud Architect exam. Once that one was renewed, I noticed that Google silently and retroactively increased the validity of Google Associate Cloud Engineer certifications from 2 to 3 years, so I will be able to renew that one next year.

On-premise data centers do not need to be legacy

 September 14, 2023 -  London, UK

On-premise data centers do not need to be legacy

 September 6, 2023 -  Vilnius, LT

Implement WebFinger with AWS CloudFront and AWS Lambda

 July 24, 2023

This website is hosted on AWS S3 and uses AWS CloudFront as CDN. I use a couple of AWS Lambda@Edge functions to make AWS CloudFront a little brighter. When I decided to self-host a Fediverse instance, it became immediately evident that I would have to set up WebFinger on my domain to be able to use my root domain as the account domain. There is documentation on the web on how to set up WebFinger, but it is aimed at different setups, so I had to configure it myself.