Alex Budurovici. Senior Tech Lead and Cloud Architect in Zurich. Platform engineering, SaaS, Cloud and FinOps, IaC. 2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z https://budurovici.com/ Alexandru Budurovici https://budurovici.com/notes/self-hosting-n8n-synology-dsm 2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z 2026-10-01T00:00:00.000Z

n8n on Synology DSM with external task runners, one Postgres with a role per service, SearXNG, Browserless, ntfy, NocoDB and Grafana, and what DSM changes.

https://budurovici.com/notes/n8n-assistant-sandbox-synology-dsm 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

n8n's Assistant sandbox fails on Synology DSM because five kernel features are missing. The errors, the settings that work around four, and what they cost.

https://budurovici.com/notes/playwright-smoke-tests-deploy-gate-github-actions 2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

A five-journey Playwright smoke in GitHub Actions that blocks promote, a nightly ladder that does not, and the checks that keep red meaning stop.

https://budurovici.com/notes/zero-downtime-database-migrations-github-actions 2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

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 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

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 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

Terraform module boundaries, environment roots, isolated state per account, and pinned promotion, so teams can extend a cloud estate without breaking it.

https://budurovici.com/notes/how-to-fix-slow-wordpress-admin 2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

A step-by-step diagnosis for slow WordPress admin: outbound plugin calls, Heartbeat, autoloaded options, WP-Cron, slow queries, PHP, and OPcache.

https://budurovici.com/notes/network-topology-multi-cloud-decision 2026-08-10T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

Why VPC and VNet models diverge 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 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

Role design, OIDC for pipelines, SSO for people, access reviews, and time-boxed break-glass: production access that stays auditable across cloud accounts.

https://budurovici.com/notes/golden-images-image-hardening-server-baselines 2026-07-27T00:00:00.000Z 2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z

Packer golden images: bake vs configure boundaries, promotion pipelines, launch-template enforcement, and baseline 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 cloud.

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

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 2026-09-13T00:00:00.000Z

Query Monitor trace: Modern Events Calendar firing 28 uncached outbound HTTP calls per admin page load, and how host-level egress blocking removed the delay.

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

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 2019-09-11T00:00:00.000Z

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 2019-08-23T00:00:00.000Z

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 2018-05-22T00:00:00.000Z

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 2015-10-09T00:00:00.000Z

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 2014-10-09T00:00:00.000Z

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 2014-02-13T00:00:00.000Z

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.