Experts Live Europe 2018 – are you ready for Prague?

Posted on 04/09/2018 by Marcel Zehner

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 Marcel Zehner

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 Marcel Zehner

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 Marcel Zehner

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 Marcel Zehner

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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Azure Resource Policies Management in the Azure Portal

Posted on 08/02/2018 by Marcel Zehner

A while back I blogged about Azure Policies. Policies can be used as part of Azure Governance to audit and enforce compliance. For instance, it lets you enforce the use of specific regions, or enforces you to tag your resources. I covered the details already in my previous blog post and will not go into the details again. Meanwhile things have changed and there is a graphical implementation available that can be used to manage policies in the Azure portal.

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Upcoming speaking engagements H1 2018

Posted on 17/01/2018 by Marcel Zehner

The new year just started and I am already booked as a speaker or expert for many events and conferences. As always, connecting with the community is key to me and my role, so I am happy to rock stages soon again and meet with people that have the community DNA! Find my confirmed engagements for H1 2018 below in chronological order. Looking forward to each and every event! Drop me a message if you are attending as well and would like to connect!

Cheers, Marcel

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Building a simple release pipeline for ARM templates

Posted on 08/11/2017 by Marcel Zehner

Using release pipelines is a pretty common thing for agile developers, but not necessarily for IT Pros. However, they can still very much benefit from that process when working with their IT pro artefacts such as scripts, ARM templates, runbooks, Dockerfiles etc. to get more agile and keep environments stable and clean. In this post I will demonstrate how to build a (very) simple release pipeline from A-Z for ARM templates. Have fun!

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Quick Overview: Azure Container Instances (Preview)

Posted on 16/10/2017 by Marcel Zehner

Windows containers are getting more and more popular. Azure already has multiple container-related features and more will be added in the near future. Today I quickly want to cover Azure Container Instances (ACI). This allows you to spin up containers on the Azure platform without even deploying a container host. Cool, huh?

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Delivering the Keynote at InfoNet Day 2017

Posted on 03/10/2017 by Marcel Zehner

On October 31 2017, I will again present at the annual InfoNet Day event in Olten-Switzerland. The event is focused on a technical audience and covers Microsoft topics across the board – cloud, datacenter and workplace. I will present the “Cloud & Datacenter Management”-Keynote”. The keynote title I chose for this year is “Cloud Trends – Microsoft IT Professional Edition”.

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