Learn how to run Bicep on an M1 Mac using VSCode, addressing the .Net 5.0 runtime issue with Rosetta 2 and Homebrew.

VSCode + Bicep on an M1 Mac

Probably a little late to the party with this one, but I have recently upgraded to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, for the most part, the problems with moving to arm64 are not as bad as I thought - most are annoying little things. However, the biggest one came when I decided to take a serious look at Bicep. After installing the Bicep VSCode extension ↗ and opening a test Bicep file, I was greeted with the following message … ...

December 4, 2021 · 3 min · Russ McKendrick
Just installed macOS Monterey and Python on my MacBook Pro! Easy peasy with pyenv. Check out my experience!

Managing Python on macOS Monterey

This week was not only the release of macOS Monterey, but it was also new Mac Book Pro week for a lot of people, including myself. Given that it was alot of effot to install Python on macOS Big Sur I was a little worried that it would take the same amount of effort. As I was starting a with a clean macOS Monterey installation and had already installed Homebew↗ I just needed to run the following command to install pyenv↗ : ...

October 30, 2021 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick
Discover how to run Podman on macOS using a virtual machine, enabling Docker compatibility and container management.

Running Podman on macOS

Last weekend I posted about Docker Desktop Alternatives for macOS, and it looks like I missed one as the week before Podman↗ release version v3.3.0↗ which introduced support for macOS by allowing you to launch a Podman managed virtual machine. So, What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. ...

September 12, 2021 · 8 min · Russ McKendrick
Explore Docker Desktop alternatives for macOS: Lima, Rancher Desktop, and Minikube offer containerization and Kubernetes clustering solutions.

Docker Desktop Alternatives for macOS

After the news earlier this week that Docker will be introducing charges to the Docker Subscription Service Agreement, as detailed in the Tweet below: We're updating and extending our product subscriptions! New subscription tiers include Personal, Pro, Team, and Business. Details here: https://t.co/pyDetDKGjC #Docker #Subscriptions pic.twitter.com/Or8l6YoIUO — Docker: Build 39X Faster (@Docker) August 31, 2021 I started to think about looking at alternatives, while I use Docker Desktop I did not use it enough to warrant looking at one of the new subscriptions. There are two main reasons to run Docker Desktop ...

September 5, 2021 · 12 min · Russ McKendrick
Notes on Terraform Azure deployments: diagnostic settings, expiration dates, Azure Automation Account web hooks.

Some Terraform Azure Notes

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. This is where the azurerm_monitor_diagnostic_categories↗ data source comes in. ...

August 30, 2021 · 8 min · Russ McKendrick
Explore Packer's use with Rocky Linux. Migrate CentOS projects efficiently. Use provided templates for Virtualbox and VMWare.

Rocky Linux and Packer

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: ...

August 28, 2021 · 4 min · Russ McKendrick
Track Terraform costs with Infracost. Install, register, and monitor changes in your Azure DevOps pipeline efficiently.

Tracking costs in Terraform using Infracost

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.e. me, making a change which would dramatically increase the running costs of the deployment. ...

August 24, 2021 · 14 min · Russ McKendrick
Setting up an Azure DevOps pipeline for Terraform deployments with Checkov scans, validation, and manual approval steps.

Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline with Checkov & Approvals

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. ...

June 8, 2021 · 13 min · Russ Mckendrick