Self-Healing I.T. Orchestration with Jenkins, Powershell, ServiceNow and Azure DevOps!
Most I.T. ticketing systems have an incident module to wait for users to submit issues so that the team can triage and react to solve the issue. In some cases you can spot repetitive issues and automate a fix or workaround to, at least, proactively bring services back online faster than waiting for an user to get an issue and then report the incident. Another benefit on automating fixes or work arounds is that they work 24/7 and they respond faster then the on call person. In this article I will show how to use Jenkins, Powershell, ServiceNow and Azure DevOps to orchestrate a server reboot after detecting a specific issue in the event log of a Windows server.
Deploy A Private Elastic Cloud Kubernetes Cluster On Azure DevOps Pipelines For CI/CD
ElasticSearch has developed a great Operator for Kubernetes to orchestrate tasks to make things easier to deploy and prevent cowboy engineers like me forcing changes that end up breaking stuff :D . In this article I will go over deploying ECK on AKS via ADO and I will share some FYIs. (Too many acronyms, get ready for more.)
Storing and Passing the packer imageid to Azure DevOps variable in a variable group.
For infrastructure as code I am using packer (Build Immutable image) task to create a gold image. I then want to pass the image URI to Terraform so it can spin up servers or scale sets. Since I like to add date/time in our packer image name then the name is not static so we have to save the resource ID somewhere after a successful packer build so that Terraform is aware of which image to use.
Using ServiceNow flow REST step to start and pass variables to an Azure DevOps pipeline with started integrationhub package.
If you have the starter pack and want to create your own automation without having to pay for higher packs you can pass variables to Azure DevOps or Jenkins and run pipelines to orchestrate tasks.
In this article we configure a SNOW Catalog Item with a Flow which has a rest step that passes variables and starts a pipeline in Azure DevOps. The pipeline then runs the script with variables and updates the request so the user is aware of progress. Then the SNOW flow checks the request and based on the modification from the script it closes the request or opens a task for IT to check and perform the request manually.
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.