Overall, Blazor server-side has been good for internal apps and prototyping. I tried to see how far I could get in a project without any third party component libraries but couldn’t do much. There are some good functional and official components like the data grid QuickGrid, but soon I found myself needing more components. I eventually switched to MudBlazor which has been pretty good at replicating what you might see in the vast wealth of JS front end libs.

I have set up a new box for one of my side projects and am trying to make it as container-friendly as possible. I started from scratch with a new version of TrueNAS that no longer uses kubernetes. For my setup, this is fine since I only have two containers that don’t need any fancy orchestration.

One recent change I made was to have my ASP.NET Core container authenticate against AWS using IAM Roles Anywhere. With this method of authentication, you can have your container assume an IAM role, similar to how a container in ECS assumes role. I also don’t have to manage credentials on the box itself.

For the past year I have been working on-and-off on a project that will sync all my photos and videos to S3. My main goal was to minimize storage costs and provide and off-site backup. It has worked for me, but the process of backing everything up is a very bespoke workflow so it’s probably useful to only me.

I have media coming from an iPhone, a GoPro, an Insta360 and occasionally a couple of old DSLRs, so I need to keep it all organized. My project, an ASP.NET Core app, just provides a simple way to track and upload these files. Part of the workflow is spinning up a couple containers (one for the app and one for PostgreSQL) so that I can back up everything up.

One of my PostgreSQL tables recently just hit 50 million rows. For cost reduction and because this is just a pet project, I run all my databases in AWS ECS with persistent storage in EFS. While this does mean a only couple dollars for computing and a few dollars for storage per day, this also means I get none of the benefits of an actual AWS RDS instance. No backups or anything.

This is a follow-up to my previous post where Testcontainers was not freeing up ports in build pipelines.

I am using .NET PostgreSQL Testcontainers to ensure my application runs end-to-end. My integration tests would always run fine on my local machine but occasionally in the GitHub runners environment, I would see a Connection refused error ("It worked on my computer!").

My guess is the container did not finish the PostgreSQL start up processes by the time the tests started.