DevOps 🦾

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. ...

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; ...

Probably a little late to the party with this one, but I have recently upgraded to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, for the most part, the problems with moving to arm64 are not as bad as I thought - most are annoying little things. However, the biggest one came when I decided to take a serious look at Bicep. After installing the Bicep VSCode extension ↗ and opening a test Bicep file, I was greeted with the following message … ...

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about the Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline I used to use↗ , I say used to use, because that pipeline is now a little outdated.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

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. ...