Azure Blueprints – Overview

Posted on 04/10/2018 by

Azure Blueprints were announced during Microsoft Ignite 2018. I had the privilege to already get access some months earlier and played with the new feature/service to gain some experience. In this blog post I want to give you a quick overview and kickstart what Azure Blueprints are and how they can be used to govern Azure environments.

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Azure Monitor for VMs

Posted on 27/09/2018 by

During Microsoft Ignite 2018, a new feature went to public preview: Azure Monitor for VMs. As the feature name mentions, it’s about monitoring virtual machines and tightly integrate those into Azure Monitor. This blog post gives you some first insights.

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Experts Live Europe 2018 – are you ready for Prague?

Posted on 04/09/2018 by

The time has come again: from October 24-26 2018, Experts Live Europe will take place again for the sixth time! This big European Community Conference attracts about 400 people every year to different places in Europe – and I am proud to be a part of this awesome organisation team! This year we are once again bringing together the world’s best speakers and experts to talk about the latest Microsoft Cloud, Datacenter and Workplace topics. It’s THE opportunity for participants to acquire first-hand practical knowledge and to get open questions answered.

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Terraform – using multiple files for configurations and variables

Posted on 22/05/2018 by

Welcome back to the third post of the Terraform series. In this post I will cover, how Terraform can merge multiple configuration and variables files into one. This gives you better transparency, flexibility and control for your Terraform-based deployments. Enjoy!

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Terraform – introducing input variables

Posted on 19/05/2018 by

In my last Terraform post I talked a little bit about the basics what Terraform is and how it works from ground up. In this post I want to focus on input variables and how they can be used to create flexible deployments.

Terraform Series

1. A first introduction
2. Introducing input variables (this post)
3. Using multiple files for configurations and variables

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Terraform – a first introduction

Posted on 14/05/2018 by

Infrastructure as code is very popular for some time already. When talking about deploying infrastructure or application components to Microsoft Azure as code, then the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) will come to your attention. ARM manages resources that live in Azure and is used to deploy and update them as needed. When using the Azure portal, ARM is used under the covers to manage the resources. But it also offers APIs to communicate with it from the outside world. For instance you can pass ARM templates that contain a descriptive configuration of your application and ARM will take care of provisioning it. Nothing new so far, but in today’s world, the perfect world where only Azure is used to host applications and services is not the reality what we see when talking to customers. Hybrid clouds or multi cloud environments are the reality. ARM can only be used for Azure and Azure Stack, but when you need to cover more platforms, Terraform might be a good option for you. In this blog post I will give a quick overview what Terraform is and how it works.

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Auto-Deploy Container Images as Azure Container Instances (ACI)

Posted on 08/05/2018 by

Containers are pretty new in the Microsoft world, but are quickly getting traction. Microsoft Azure offers lots of container-related services such as Azure Container Instances (ACI), Azure Container Service (ACS), Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) or Azure Container Registry (ACR). I already covered Azure Container Instances here, so I will not go into any details again – even if some things slightly changed since then. What I wanna cover in this post however is the automatic deployment of Docker images onto ACI.

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