Cloud ⛅️

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....

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....

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/ external link 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....

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 external link . 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....

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 external link , in that post I launched Rancher locally and used it target a few VirtualBox VMs....

I am still catching up on all of the announcements from the AWS re:invent 2016, one of the ones I was interested in was Amazon Lightsail. I have always found Digital Ocean to be useful for launching instances, doing some test installations of XYZ and then terminating them. It makes perfect sense that Amazon would offer a service which allows you to consume resources in the same way Digital Ocean allow their users to, they have the infrastructure to provide as well as an established customer base who probably already use Digital Ocean....

More and more I am having to not only think about how I would ensure that the infrastructure a service I am deploying on is highly available but also how I can manage its entire life-cycle in code. I have tried several tools for this such as Terraform external link , Puppet and Ansible, however over the last six months or so I have settled on Ansible. After I first looked at it back in December 2014 external link it has come on quite a lot, especially after the version 2 release at the start of this year external link ....

Yesterday the following email dropped into my inbox … … I spend a lot of the day job looking at and talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS) so this had got my interest. In my last book external link I covered Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and I have to admit that it wasn’t the most greatest service Amazon had released, especially compared the ease you can now launch Swarm Clusters using Docker....