Firewall options for the cost conscious Azure lab owner

Introduction For most businesses using some kind of firewall in Azure is not optional , these firewalls could be a cloud native offering such as Azure Firewall or a Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) running on IaaS such as Palo Alto, Checkpoint, Fortigate etc etc. A popular and common networking model in Azure that utilises some … Continue reading Firewall options for the cost conscious Azure lab owner →

Dual booting Ubuntu and Windows 10 – Surface Book

I'm not exactly a Linux newbie but nor can I claim be at sysadmin level of Linux knowledge. Linux however, is a definite area I want to improve my knowledge and skills in. I wanted Ubuntu as my daily OS but a VM on my laptop just wasn't doing it for me. I therefore decided … Continue reading Dual booting Ubuntu and Windows 10 – Surface Book →

Terraform 0.12

So Terraform 0.12 was just released. I sat down this morning to have a quick play with it. I strongly recommend following the upgrade guide and make a separate branch of your TF files before testing 0.12. After getting everything setup and ready to test I ran a plan and apply using Terraform 0.11.14 and … Continue reading Terraform 0.12 →

Deallocate Azure VMs with Azure Devops – Scheduled VM shutdown.

Having been inspired by Gregor Suttie's post 'Replacing Azure Automation using Azure CLI and Azure Devops' I decided to do something similar with Powershell. My requirement was to power off VMs with a certain tag and value at a certain time. The PowerShell for this is fairly simple: Get-AzVM | Where-Object {$_.tags['shutDown'] -eq "19:00"} | Stop-AZVM … Continue reading Deallocate Azure VMs with Azure Devops – Scheduled VM shutdown. →

Combining Terraform with Azure Devops

Really short and straight to the point post. 😀 I use the 'Terraform Tasks for Azure DevOps' extensions which makes using Terraform with Azure Devops an absolute breeze I have a build pipleline which initiates the remote storage for the Terraform state file, perfoms the Terraform init and the Terraform plan, all relevant files are … Continue reading Combining Terraform with Azure Devops →

Azure Security Center & log Analytics Workspaces

Azure Security Center is a good thing to have as part of your Azure resources and it comes in two tiers: Free or Standard. By default it is enabled in your Azure subscription at the free tier and changing that to standard unlocks additional features and comes with some costs . So you've upgraded Security … Continue reading Azure Security Center & log Analytics Workspaces →

When life gets confusing – check your AzureRM module version

I had to enable disk encryption on some existing Azure VMs this morning but I kept hitting a snag even though I had done this before and was using the same powershell as before. Here's the PowerShell: $rgName = 'MySecureRg'; $vmName = 'MySecureVM'; $KeyVaultName = 'MySecureVault'; $KeyVault = Get-AzureRmKeyVault -VaultName $KeyVaultName -ResourceGroupName $rgname; $diskEncryptionKeyVaultUrl = … Continue reading When life gets confusing – check your AzureRM module version →

Intro to using Terraform for Azure resource deployments

  I've been increasingly using Terraform for my Infrastructure as Code deployments to Azure and I really like it and prefer it to using ARM templates.  The thing I like most about Terraform is that it's simple to use yet very powerful in its capabilities. This post is not intended to be an in-depth introduction … Continue reading Intro to using Terraform for Azure resource deployments →