As the DevOps landscape evolves, so do our methods for managing tools like Ansible. This post outlines my current preferred approach to installing and managing Ansible on macOS. The Traditional Homebrew Approach For years, many macOS users, including myself, relied on Homebrew to install and maintain Ansible. The process was straightforward: Installing Ansible using Homebrew brew install ansible While this method effectively managed the core Ansible installation, it became problematic as Ansible’s ecosystem grew more complex....

This week I decided to see how many buzzwords I could get into one post, given the recent release of Flux by Black Forest Labs I had originally intended on trying to get it up and running locally - however it quickly became clear that my M3 MacBook Pro with its 36GB of RAM wasn’t going to cut it. Because of this, I decided to look at one of the many online services that offer access to the various Flux models via their APIs which led me to Fal....

If you’ve ever joined me on a Teams call from my home office, you’ve likely noticed the wall of vinyl records behind me. This post aims to answer the most common questions I get on calls, offering a glimpse into my music collection and the technology used to play it. The Collection My vinyl collection is more than just a backdrop; let me give you a tour: The Main Attraction The wall you see behind me during video calls is just the beginning:...

Don’t you just love it when you open your laptop first thing on a Monday morning, a fresh cup of coffee at the ready and you think to yourself … This should be a straight-forward five-minute job to start the week with … and it turns out to be anything but? That is exactly what happened to me this week, I won’t go into too much detail, but I was working on an Azure Logic App that had to interact with an external service and pass it a a fully signed SAS URL for an Azure Storage Account so that it could send some quite large files there....

This is a quick post to share a useful KQL query for Azure Firewalls that I’ve been using. It’s based on the default Firewall query from Microsoft, but with some added variables to allow for a more focused analysis of source and destination traffic. I’m putting it here for my future reference and in case it’s helpful for anyone else. Azure Firewall Query with Variables This query allows you to analyze Azure Firewall logs, focusing on specific source and destination IP addresses within a defined time range....

This is a quick post collating some of the notes for KQL queries for Azure Virtual Desktop I have in various documents into a single place, just in case they are helpful for anyone and also for my reference, 👋 hello future Russ. Find out all the IP addresses in the last 30 days This query looks at the past 30 days, counting connections by username and client IP address, then sorts these counts in descending order, adds geolocation data for each IP, and finally outputs the client IP, connection count, and location details (country, state, and city) to provide insights into connection patterns and frequencies across different users and locations in the Windows Virtual Desktop environment....

Back in May 2020 I published what would be one of the more popular posts on this blog Azure DevOps Ansible Pipeline, it covered the Azure DevOps pipeline I had settled upon for running my Ansible playbooks which built and interacted with workloads running in Microsoft Azure. Fast forward four years, I updated the pipeline for Chapter 15 of the second edition of Learn Ansible↗ ; this version of the pipeline, which is covered in detail in the book, can be found in the repo linked below;...

It looks like I have written about the tools I use day-to-day since 2017; I wonder how much has changed. 🤔 Info As you may already know, I am a macOS user, so all of the tools covered in this post primarily run on Macs. 🍎 Desktop Apps 💻 Visual Studio Code↗ : This is still my primary IDE; I use it for all of the infrastructure as code I write along with any other code I need to write and debug, and trust me, there is more debugging going on than writing most of the time....