# Quick update on my AZ-400 side project

I've built a self-hosted sentiment analysis service running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using Ollama (phi3:mini).
Yesterday I finally got it working in the Whizlabs sandbox.
Today I completed the full Azure CI/CD pipeline.
Cost control was a big factor for me: I'm running everything in my Visual Studio Professional subscription with only €45 in credits left!

What I built:

- Terraform for AKS cluster, Spot user nodepool, and static Public IP
- Multi-container architecture with a clean LLM adapter pattern
- Traefik Ingress Controller (with ARM64 considerations on the system nodepool)
- Cost optimization experiments (Spot vs on-demand, Dpsv6 system pool)
- Proper ConfigMap-driven prompts, health probes, and model pulling
- Cross-subscription deployment setup
- Reusable CI/CD pipeline with separate bootstrap + main stages

This project helped me connect my daily Azure DevOps work with the AZ-400 topics I'm studying. I learned a lot about real-world trade-offs, especially around cost optimization and infrastructure-as-code.

(Video demo coming soon)

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*Co-authored with Claude.*

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