Azure ☁️

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. ...

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. ...

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about the Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline I used to use↗ , I say used to use, because that pipeline is now a little outdated.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. ...

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; ...

One of the annoying things about updating to the latest version of macOS is that a lot of the command-line tools I use tend to break or need tweaking slightly from how I have been using them. One of the annoyances in the move to Big Sur is that Python is a back to being a massive pain, and more so than normal. At the time of writing pyenv↗ is not running all that well, and while there are fixes available they slow down my shell — for more information on the problem see this GitHub issue↗ and for information on why pyenv see my previous post on updating Python on macOS↗ . ...

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. ...