IaC - Gold Image as Code: A DevOps approach to building base images efficiently!
My favorite task is to automate a process that takes days, manual configs and meetings with SMEs into a pipeline with scripts that complete in minutes. In this article we are using Azure DevOps pipelines, Azure Vault, Azure Blob Storage, Hashicorp's packer, Chocolatey and Powershell to orchestrate the creation of a gold image that has the latest-patched version of Windows 10 H2, nine applications installed and 2 configurations applied. All of this is built in less than 1 hour and the pipeline can be triggered every month to get new patches and software updates without interaction. The base images can be used for WVD, Citrix machine catalogs, RDSH and scale groups .
Easy config of an Azure DevOps agent in a Kubernetes cluster with Helm Charts
Helm charts make it simple to deploy containers in K8S . I see it as Kubernetes package manager, think Chocolatey for Windows. Here are simple steps to get the Azure Agent configured in your Kubernetes cluster by using Helm charts and parameters so that you can have your own or extra builder in your pipelines if you already have a K8S cluster.
Citrix Remote PC Custom Add-On: Reboot your physical PC Remotely.
Citrix Remote PC Access allows you to connect to your office PC from anywhere / any device by leveraging Citrix’s virtual desktop agent on the physical desktop. In order for this technology to work, as expected, your PC needs to have enough resources (CPU / RAM, Bandwidth, etc) and Citrix services running. It is rare but at times you might need to reboot your PC to reset resources and services in order to connect remotely via Citrix. In this article you will see how you can restart your own PC remotely without waiting for someone to do IT for you!
Adding an SMB/CIFS mount to your K8S Plex deployment to watch or migrate your existing content.
I like to use Plex to store and watch tech and financial videos, tutorials and seminars. Since I've been rebuilding my lab to use K8S and containers I needed to point the k8s Plex build to my existing data in my NAS. K8S has the concept of Persistent Volumes and Persistent Volume Claims which I explain in this article and how to use it with your microk8s KubePlex deployment.