Over the next few weeks, I am planning on doing some work which requires me to spin up and teardown several small Kubernetes clusters. As I have access to an Azure Subscription and Microsoft have made the process of launching a cluster quite a painless experience I thought it would make sense to write a quick blog post to cover launching, configuring and tearing down an Azure AKS Cluster. To start with I prefer to set a few environment variables on the command-line for things such and the resource name which are repeated through of the commands I need to run;...

As I am finding myself using Microsoft Azure more and more I thought I would make some notes about how to quickly access the various web portals. The Azure Portal A lot of the time I use the standard http://portal.azure.com/↗ URL, but as I started having to jump around various accounts for work and also personal use, I discovered that there were some great short cuts you can use. The quickest of these I have been using to navigate the main Azure portal is appending the primary domain of the tenant you want to access to the end of the URL, for example http://portal....

After the announcement a few weeks back↗ that Apple would be defaulting to zsh↗ in macOS Catalina I decided to take the plunge and make the switch on my current machines. I have tried making the switch once before, but for one reason or another I ended up reverting back to Bash. This time I decided to do a little more reading up and also add the .zshrc file to my dotfiles repo↗ and move as much as my ....

I have been using Terraform over the last few months, having not used it in anger for quite a while↗ since the projects I have been working on have been more suitable for using Ansible↗ . However, as I am doing more and more with Microsoft Azure, I found the Ansible modules a little lacking, plus for someone of the projects I have had to use an orchestration tool which can natively run on Windows....

A few days ago DigitalOcean released their Managed Kubernetes service, as I had a little time this afternoon I decided to give it a spin. Each of the public clouds has a Kubernetes service now, I covered these in the third edition of Mastering Docker↗ . The general gist of the chapter was that both the Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud offerings were both excellent. However, the Amazon Web Services offering was an over-complicated mess....

It has been 270 days since my last post, so what I have been doing with my time? Well, I have been busy writing, just not this blog. Not only have I wrote and released Learn Ansible↗ , but also I have updated the Second Edition of Mastering Docker↗ bringing it up to date with the release of the Third Edition of Mastering Docker↗ which is now available from Packt Publishing↗ ....

Over the last six months the Docker Store, which was first introduced as a private beta nearly a year and a half ago in June 2016, has come on leaps and bounds. It has quickly, but without much fanfare, become a one stop shop for all things Docker, with the both the documentation and home pages linking back to content now hosted on the store. So what is the Docker Store?...

As I had some free time this weekend so I thought it would be good to have a play with the recently released preview of Rancher 2.0. Please do not follow along with this post, you will see why towards the end !!! When I last wrote about Rancher, is was back in June 2016↗ , in that post I launched Rancher locally and used it target a few VirtualBox VMs....