A while ago I announced a new infrastructure-as-code live stream. The idea was to give interested persons a kickstart how to use common tools and procedures they can use on Azure, either with ARM templates or Terraform. The poll results were pretty close and so I decided to run two live streams – one for each topic.
In 2019, Hashicorp announced their very own Terraform Cloud. It allows you to manage state remotely, allows the remote execution of plan, apply and destroy tasks and supports integration with common version control systems to manage your code (and some more features). In this post I will demonstrate the basic setup of the Terraform Cloud for a flexible scenario with two workspaces that are totally managed remotely. Continue reading
Some days ago I wrote an article how one can bring existing resources under Terraform management. While this is a valid scenario, the opposite could also be needed. This blog post demonstrates several methods how one can release existing resources from Terraform management – maybe to bring them under control of some other tool.
In a perfect world, an application with all of its components is provisioned and managed as code from the very beginning. But unfortunately that is not always the reality. Some companies start to provision services manually before they find out this might not be a good thing for the long run. Others start with one tool, only to find out that they feel more comfortable with another tool – and want to change it. If you are using Hashicorp’s Terraform to manage your infrastructure, you can bring existing resources that have been provisioned outside of Terraform under its control. Read on to find out how.
July 1 is an important day for the worldwide Microsoft community. On that day, Microsoft awards new and renews existing Microsoft MVPs. I am more than happy to have been renewed for another year in the “Microsoft Azure” category.
Deploying services in Azure is as simple as going to the marketplace and filling out a form. And boom, a new service or resource is up and running. This is great because it saves time and makes services accessible to us in very little time. However, there is a big downside with this simple approach that lots of companies do not keep in mind – and might hit them hard later.
Two weeks ago I received a nice confirmation email from Microsoft and finally I am allowed to share the news: My nomination for becoming a Microsoft Regional Director for Switzerland has been approved! That said, I am again part of a privileged group of approx. 160 people from around the globe that closely works with Microsoft to drive business and community engagements.
Azure Security Center (ASC) is your main stop when you need a first broad overview of your environment’s security posture. If there is potential to improve your overall security, ASC will give you recommendations that explain how a specific resource can be better protected. In addition to that, you can use advanced security features that assist you to detect and protect against threats. Those features bring additional intelligence to the show (think of machine learning) and help you make easier decisions to drive security to the next level.
I was asked recently if it is possible to use symbols when assigning names to Azure objects. The short answer is ‘yes’, this is indeed possible, but definitely not something I would recommend in a business environment. However, it makes things look nice, shiny and less boring and might be of use to drive attention in workshops, demos etc.
My last post about Azure Front Door went through the roof, so I though to deliver some more content about this topic. In this post I will focus on how Azure Front Doors can be deployed and managed using the Azure CLI. This will also unveil some new secrets about the service that are important to understand before you start managing it in a production environment.
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