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....
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↗ ....