New Terraform 1.1 Refactoring Feature!
The new refactoring feature can help when (many times) you find a better module but you don't want to go through the shuffle of the mv command. I liked one scenario explained in the demo which was the decoupling a web config from a specific cloud provider module to a module that can be used for multiple clouds done without the mv command and less risk.
Deploying Azure App Service Environment v3, App Plan and blue/green Functions with Terraform via Azure DevOps.
Azure's ASE is all about serverless! In a Windows environment IT usually spins up a server in an on prem hypervisor, updates it, installs security software and SCCM to patch it and then configure IIS with certs and bindings for Development to deploy simple code. The ASE is an abstraction of all those layers and provides a platform for Dev to deploy code. Thanks to Jason Savill's youtube channel for a great overview on ASE v3, the video is embedded here for review and I explain the different areas in terraform.
Working with secure files (certs) in Azure DevOps and Terraform the easy way without compromising security.
The documentation from Hashicorp is great! If you are using your shell with terraform then the docs will save you lots of time but eventually you'll want to use terraform in your pipelines and this is where things change, for better! In this article we show how you can save the steps of creating an Azure vault, setting permissions and uploading secrets or certs to use later on. Since we are using Azure DevOps pipelines we can use the secure file download task to get our cert on the agent and upload it directly to the app service in our case. We are not compromising security by making it simpler which is the best part.
Want to make I.T. Happy? Automate Cert Import and Binding for IIS.
An important part of any web server build is to install a valid SSL cert and bind it to the sites. In a regular IT team certs are misunderstood since it is something they do only when they expire or when there is a new server to build, some even fear dealing with certs. New IT teams are building servers and infrastructure as code and this step makes it easy to deploy and bind the certs when using windows and IIS.
Configure the Azure DevOps Agent to use Ansible playbooks locally.
Sometimes you might want to do things in localhost. My example is that I want to mount a share locally so that I can create directories for mount points and different permissions. I don't want to spin up a new machine to do this simple task so I will run Ansible on the localhost which is my Azure DevOps Agent.
Easy way to create an Ansible Dynamic Inventory from an Azure Resource group
I was looking at the best way to create an inventory from a virtual machine scale set and found this gem. The Azure dynamic-inventory plugin is the easiest way to get VMs, scale set and resources from resource groups and do stuff with ansible.
Elastic Cloud Enterprise Configuration with Ansible
One of the advantages about using DevOps practices is that you can rely less in documentation and more on orchestration. Documentation can come from a vendor or the engineer that configured the system or a mix of both since you have to modify based on your environments. Using an Ansible role like the one developed by Elastic saves a ton of time and add best practices and performance tuning while at it!
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.
Create secured, fast and efficient self service software installations for your users by integrating ServiceNow's IntegrationHub, Powershell and Chocolatey
If you have servicenow and chocolatey in your company this is a great project to provide your users with a way to get software without depending on a busy IT admin to remote in to your PC, download files and install apps. Chocolatey steamlines app installs and Service Now takes the same request the user would've submitted to a person and turns it into a powershell script that is securely executed with your mid servers. In this article we show the basics of the integration.
More Linux-like features for Windows, this time is the built-in package manager: WinGet
In I.T. we are used to tools like SCCM, Altiris and PDQ to name a few and they get the job done but in order to transition to a DevOps worklfow we need a command based / linux-like package management solution. Powershell scripts can be used to download, install and report on MSIs and EXEs exit codes. Chocolatey organized and created a central repo for all of us to colaborate and pull from. Now, Microsoft, is developing WinGet to have a built-in, linux-like, choco-familiar, devops way to do package management. In this article you will see how to configure WinGet and install an app.