Alex Budurovici. Senior Tech Lead and Cloud Architect in Zurich. Platform engineering, SaaS, Cloud and FinOps, IaC. 2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z https://budurovici.com/ Alexandru Budurovici https://budurovici.com/notes/zero-downtime-database-migrations-github-actions 2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z

Zero-downtime, rollback-safe database migrations with GitHub Actions. Expand, drain, contract: the schema, queue, and config changes a digest rollback cannot undo.

https://budurovici.com/notes/cicd-standardisation-across-application-teams 2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z 2026-08-29T00:00:00.000Z

Reusable GitHub Actions workflows, Environment-scoped OIDC, and digest promotion so several teams ship without each inventing a private release path.

https://budurovici.com/notes/terraform-module-patterns-multi-environment 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z 2026-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

Reusable Terraform module boundaries, environment composition, state management, and hand-off patterns for repeatable cloud platforms.

https://budurovici.com/notes/how-to-fix-slow-wordpress-admin 2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z 2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z

A systematic approach to diagnosing slow WordPress admin. Covers all common causes: plugin outbound HTTP calls, WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL, Heartbeat API, autoloaded options, WP-Cron, PHP version, OPcache, object cache, and slow database queries.

https://budurovici.com/notes/network-topology-multi-cloud-decision 2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z 2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z

Why VPC and VNet models diverge more than any other control across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud, and how to decide what to standardise versus what to leave provider-native.

https://budurovici.com/notes/rbac-patterns-production-cloud-environments 2026-08-03T00:00:00.000Z 2026-08-03T00:00:00.000Z

Role design, automation identities, access review, and break-glass controls for auditable production access across shared cloud estates.

https://budurovici.com/notes/golden-images-image-hardening-server-baselines 2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z 2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z

An operating model for Packer golden images: bake vs configure boundaries, promotion pipelines, launch-template enforcement, and automatable hardening checks across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

https://budurovici.com/notes/practical-cloud-cost-optimisation 2026-06-02T00:00:00.000Z 2026-07-25T00:00:00.000Z

An operating model for right-sizing, reserved capacity, and cost ownership across AWS, Azure, and GCP without compromising production reliability.

https://budurovici.com/notes/plan-cloud-migration-without-operational-risk 2026-06-01T00:00:00.000Z 2026-06-30T00:00:00.000Z

A migration operating model for landing zones, ownership boundaries, IaC baselines, cutover planning, and cost control before workloads move to the target cloud.

https://budurovici.com/notes/block-outgoing-url-calls-with-iptables 2021-10-26T00:00:00.000Z 2024-06-01T00:00:00.000Z

Use iptables string matching to block specific outbound HTTP paths, understand HTTPS limits, and choose safer egress controls when needed.

https://budurovici.com/notes/wordpress-plugin-slow-admin-outbound-calls 2020-09-28T00:00:00.000Z 2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z

A real case: Modern Events Calendar (MEC) was responsible for 28 out of 31 outbound HTTP calls and 16 seconds of additional latency on every WordPress admin request. How it was found and stopped.

https://budurovici.com/notes/nginx-letsencrypt-and-acme-challenge 2019-10-01T00:00:00.000Z 2025-01-15T00:00:00.000Z

Fix Nginx 404 errors on .well-known/acme-challenge during Let's Encrypt HTTP-01 validation with webroot config and renewal checks.

https://budurovici.com/notes/hardening-wordpress-on-lamp 2019-09-11T00:00:00.000Z 2024-09-01T00:00:00.000Z

A layered WordPress hardening checklist for Apache on LAMP: SSH, .htaccess, wp-config, uploads, and plugin controls, with Nginx equivalents where useful.

https://budurovici.com/notes/secured-wordpress-on-ubuntu-18.04-with-nginx 2019-08-23T00:00:00.000Z 2024-09-01T00:00:00.000Z

Deploy a production-ready WordPress LEMP stack on Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx, MariaDB, PHP, TLS via Let's Encrypt, and baseline hardening controls.

https://budurovici.com/notes/fixing-chef-cluster-issues 2018-05-30T00:00:00.000Z 2018-05-30T00:00:00.000Z

Recover a high-availability Chef cluster when Elasticsearch shard allocation or service health issues block normal Chef Server operation.

https://budurovici.com/notes/mariadb-docker-utf8 2018-05-22T00:00:00.000Z 2024-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

Configure MySQL or MariaDB character sets and collations in Docker, verify Unicode storage, and understand durability tradeoffs.

https://budurovici.com/notes/installing-mongodb-on-ubuntu-15.04 2016-01-13T00:00:00.000Z 2016-01-13T00:00:00.000Z

Resolve MongoDB service startup failures on Ubuntu 15.04 during the Upstart-to-systemd transition, with unit files and verification steps.

https://budurovici.com/notes/excel-utf8-encoding-issue 2015-10-09T00:00:00.000Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Fix CSV UTF-8 encoding corruption in Microsoft Excel with correct import settings, UTF-8 BOM handling, and verification steps.

https://budurovici.com/notes/marketing-vanity-urls 2015-06-19T00:00:00.000Z 2015-06-19T00:00:00.000Z

Create trackable vanity URLs for print, QR, and email campaigns with Apache redirects, UTM parameters, and maintainable campaign rules.

https://budurovici.com/notes/avoiding-seo-penalties-for-duplicate-content-on-cloudflare-live-non-cached-subdomains 2014-10-09T00:00:00.000Z 2025-01-15T00:00:00.000Z

Prevent Cloudflare origin and preview subdomains from creating duplicate-content SEO issues with host-aware robots, canonical URLs, and redirects.

https://budurovici.com/notes/git-tips-and-tricks 2014-02-13T00:00:00.000Z 2024-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Practical Git commands for rewriting authors, recovering work, inspecting history, bisecting bugs, and keeping repositories maintainable.

https://budurovici.com/notes/lazy-loading-images 2013-11-23T00:00:00.000Z 2013-11-23T00:00:00.000Z

Use native browser lazy loading first, understand LCP and CLS tradeoffs, and keep JavaScript lazy-loading libraries for legacy cases.