In my last post↗ I wrote about how I created an Azure DevOps pipeline using Ansible in a more “Terraform” way, however, although I have used Terraform and Azure DevOps quite a bit I realised I didn’t really have a template for a pipeline. Before we look at the pipeline itself I should point out that is uses the the Terraform Azure Pipeline extension by Microsoft DevLabs ↗ from the Visual Studio Marketplace↗ , if you are following along with this post please ensure that the extension is installed in your organisation before proceeding. ...

I thought it was was about time that I started to have a play with Azure DevOps a little more than I have been doing, one of the things I have always meant to look at in the past is using DevOps to run Ansible playbooks. However the Ansible Task↗ recommended by Microsoft has always put me off, the reason for this is that this task requires a Virtual Machine to run Ansible — this to me always seemed a little overkill. ...

Over the last few months I have been doing more and more work with Ansible to manage end to end deployments in Azure. For the most part Ansible’s core set of Azure modules work with no problems and more than do the job. However, with the rate which Microsoft are both adding new features and functionality it is difficult to keep up. The core Ansible modules rely on several Azure python libraries to be updated before the functionality can be added or introduced to the core module set. ...

The latest major version of Python 2 was originally release on 03/07/2010 and on 01/01/2020 Python 2 will be no more; We have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it. You should upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can. Interestingly the latest version of macOS still ships with Python 2.7 as its default Python interpreter, however that won’t be for much longer as Apple are removing all Scripting Language Runtimes from future releases of macOS; ...

Now that CentOS 8 has been out for a few weeks I decided it was time to dip my toe in the water and update the CentOS 7 Packer scripts I had to work with CentOS 8. For those that don’t know, Packer by Hashicorp↗ , is a tool which allows you to build your own images from a number of sources and use them on a number of platforms — Hashicorp describe Packer as; ...

I am currently working on a few other blog posts and presentations for work on some Azure features which required me to launch a CentOS 7 Virtual Machine running the latest version of Ansible using an ARM template. One thing I had noticed which doing reading up on the services I am going to be using is that a lot of the demos and documentation from Microsoft had buttons where you could Deploy to Azure, so I decided to create my own — you can see the finished product below; ...

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.azure.com/myadtenant.onmicrosoft.com↗ ; ...