Automation 🤖

During the day job, I have to get a little creative with controlling costs for Azure resources; there are some everyday tasks and scenarios where Azure Logic Apps can help you save money 💰. The first is quite a typical scenario: stopping and starting Azure Virtual Machines. There was a time when I would have just used an Azure Automation Account and the Microsoft-supplied workflow. Still, Automation Accounts are a little (well, a lot) too reliant on PowerShell for my macOS using / Linux administrating tastes. ...

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. ...

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. Adding an Environment is simple enough, just click on Environment in your Pipeline and then add one with None selected under Resource; ...

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. ...

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; ...

As mentioned in my previous post I have been doing a lot of work with Docker Machine↗ and Docker Swarm↗ recently, to configure mulit-host networking with the latest version of Docker I needed to use a service discovery tool. As I had played with Consul↗ in the past I decided to use that for my back-end service discovery. Now if I wanted to launch a single node then I would run the following; ...