Restarting Azure VMs after encrypting the disks

When deploying Azure VMs with disk encryption you have to restart the VM. The disc encrypting part is an async process that finishes after the arm templates are finished. It can take up to and hour before the whole disk is encrypted. To make life easier I made a powershell script that checks the status of the encrypted disks and if the VM needs a restart:

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Deploy a Marketplace Linux VM with disk encryption using ARM templates

VM with disk encryption

Access Azure PAAS without internet access

In some Azure environments the organization limits the outbound internet traffic from their servers. There are scenarios where you need to access Azure PAAS services (blob storage, or Azure SQL database etc.). You have to block the access to the internet and enable access to the Azure IP ranges Microsoft reserved for a specific Azure datacenter. To be able to access the service I made a script that will generate the Network Security Groep Rules in ARM format to give access to Azure services.

Creating a T-shirt size ARM template

A good way of keeping on top of the configurations deployed in your Azure environment can be done by using T-shirt size configurations. T-shirt Sizes are known working configurations for your ARM templates. By using a T-shirt Size you can take away the complexity from the ARM template consumers. A sample of a T-shirt Size can be a Small, Medium of Large offering from a resource.

In this blogpost I want to show how you can use T-shirt Size configuration in an ARM template. The idea is to deploy a website where you hide all the size setting behind a Small, Medium of Large sizing. The consumer only has two parameters to start the deployment:

Terraform AzureRM too many requests (429)

When adding more resources to my azurerm terraform project, I encountered some concurrency problems. Terraform sends to many concurrent requests to azure. The Azure API gives a 429 http error. The fast solution is just to rerun your terraform apply, but that will not work in an automated environment (Infrastructure as Code). In this blog post I’ll show the error and what you can do to avoid it.

Http 429 Error

Visualizing your cloud resources with dot and Terraform

Terraform is able to generate graph files in dot (graph description language) format from your deployment plan. With some tooling the dot files be generated into image files. This makes reviewing and talking about Terraform templates easier. You are able to review a visual graph before deployment.

Getting started with Terraform on Windows and Azure

When reviewing possible for creating declarative infrastructure, I looked at Terraform. In this blog post I show how easy it is to get started and create AzureRM resources with Terraform.

Using the VSTS Zip and Unzip task

The VSTS Directory Zip and Unzip task enables you to zip multiple files and unzip zip files. The task can be installed from the Marketplace.

Using the Inline PowerShell VSTS task

The Inline PowerShell VSTS task enables you to execute PowerShell from a textbox within your build or release pipeline. You can run a PowerShell script on you agent or on Azure. The task can be installed from the Marketplace.

Parallel deployment with Azure PowerShell VSTS Release Tasks

Making better software starts with shortening the time it takes to get feedback. The less time between you start an action and its result, the bigger the chance you will do anything with the feedback. Faster is better!