Introduction to ChatOps

ChatOps is an accelerator for the implementation of DevOps. DevOps is all about enabling the team to get feature s into production quickly. This is done by unifying Dev and Ops and advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction. ChatOps is a way of combining and centralizing all the tooling for your team into one shared messaging tool. By centralizing access to your systems to one central messaging tool, you increase transparency, collaboration and productivity of you team.

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Best practices using Azure Resource Manager templates

This article focuses on best practices regarding the automated deployment of resources to Azure. We have implemented Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines including the provisioning of Azure resources for many customers, and we would like to share our experience so you can benefit from it. These practices will help you create more reliable, testable, reusable, and maintainable templates.

Infrastructure as Code VSTS

Your team is in the process of developing a new application feature, and the infrastructure has to be adapted. The first step is to change a file in your source control system that describes your infrastructure. When the changed definition file is saved in your source control system, it triggers a new build and release. Your new infrastructure is deployed to your test environment, and the whole process to get the new infrastructure deployed took minutes while you only changed a definition file and you did not touch the infrastructure itself.

Conditional parts in ARM Templates

When creating reusable ARM templates you have a number of options on how to manage conditional parts in your templates. The smallest conditions can be done by parameters, medium differences can be done by  t-shirt sizes and large differences by linked templates. In this blog post I’ll show how to use implement conditions by linked templates.

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.

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.