I have just finished working on a few large Terraform Azure deployments, thought I would stick a few notes down in a blog post so that I can refer to them in the future as well as hopefully being useful to others. Azure Diagnostic Settings While the azurerm_monitor_diagnostic_setting resource can be used to apply diagnostic settings to pretty much any other resource, however, as each resource has different logs and metrics figuring them out can be a chore....

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer↗ locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/↗ : Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project↗ has been announced, developed and then released. The project describes itself as follows:...

In my last blog post I introduced a stage which executed Checkov↗ to my Terraform Azure DevOps pipeline, this scanned the Terraform configuration and stopped the deployment if there was an issue. I also added a stage which checks to see if there are any resources being destroyed. Whats missing? Both of these I thought should give some basic protection against problems caused by common configuration issues, which they did, but it didn’t take into account the end user, i....

It’s been just over a year since I first posted about the Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline I used to use↗ , I say used to use, because that pipeline is now a little outdated. This posts covers the updated Pipeline I am starting to deploy along side my Terraform code. Pipeline Overview The pipeline itself has expanded a little and it now not only uses stages but also depending what Terraform is planning on doing it will trigger a manual approval process should there be any resources being destroyed....

As I move into using Azure DevOps more and more, there is one thing which I really haven’t got on with and that is release pipelines. I didn’t like that I couldn’t easily define it as YAML like I could with build pipelines, even though I don’t like them, there are a few things I do like — like approval gates. Environments Luckily, there are ways to get around this — the most simple way is to add an Environment and then add an Approval....

A little late, but there are my top 20 records of 2020, as per previous years these are all ones which I have purchased on vinyl. bdrmm - Bedroom↗ Doves - The Universal Want↗ Pure Reason Revolution — Eupnea↗ Orb — Abolition Of The Royal Familia↗ The Smashing Pumpkins — Cyr↗ Andy Bell — The View From Halfway Down↗ Ulver — Flowers Of Evil↗ Church Of The Cosmic Skull — Everybodys Going To Die↗ Jim Bob — Pop Up Jim Bob↗ Matt Berry — Phantom Bird↗ Working Mens Club — Working Mens Club↗ Crippled Black Phoenix — Ellengast↗ Bruce Springsteen — Letter To You↗ And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead — X: The Godless Void And Othe Stories↗ The Pineapple Thief — Versions Of The Truth↗ Ozric Tentacles — Space For The Earth↗ Abel Ganz — The Life Of The Honeybee Other Moments Of Clarity↗ Sparks — A Steady Drip Drip Drip↗ EOB — Earth↗ Badly Drawn Boy — Banana Skin Shoes↗ Katatonia — City Burials↗ Kavus Torabi — Hip To The Jag↗

When Apple releases a new version of macOS it always takes a few months for everything to catchup, following my last blog post where I mentioned that I was having problems installing Python on macOS Big Sur↗ which meant that my preferred method of installing and managing Python using pyenv, which is documented in this blog post↗ , didn’t work out of the box — and the workarounds suggested workarounds on GitHub made my shell really slow....

One of the annoying things about updating to the latest version of macOS is that a lot of the command-line tools I use tend to break or need tweaking slightly from how I have been using them. One of the annoyances in the move to Big Sur is that Python is a back to being a massive pain, and more so than normal. At the time of writing pyenv↗ is not running all that well, and while there are fixes available they slow down my shell — for more information on the problem see this GitHub issue↗ and for information on why pyenv see my previous post on updating Python on macOS↗ ....