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A common challenge when building cloud applications is how to manage the credentials in your code for authenticating to cloud services. In this session we’ll explore how to keep your credentials safe and how you can work without saving those credentials in the developers machines and therefore avoid an accidental upload to source control.

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What if I tell you that it’s possible to connect you AKS pods to an Azure Key Vault using identities but without having to use credentials in an explicit way? Well with AAD Pod Identities you can enable your Kubernetes applications to access Azure cloud resources securely using Azure Active Directory (AAD) including Azure Key Vault.

Durante el mes de Octubre tuve la suerte de grabar en LinkedIn Learning mi primer curso online sobre Kubernetes. Aun me queda mucho por aprender y mejorar en este formato, ya que mientras grabas los cursos no recibes feedback inmediato como sí ocurre cuando das una charla o haces una presentación.

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Recently I learned about GitOps which is a way to manage your Kubernetes clusters and the applications you run on top using Git. The idea is that you can declaratively describe the desired state of your systems in Git and roll out changes as soon as merges occur. You can immediately see the main benefits of such an approach: Your Git repositories become the single source of truth for both your infrastructure and application code, allowing the teams to increase productivity and stability (you get the Git log to audit changes).

Two weeks ago I got an email message from Microsoft Azure explaining that Azure Kubernetes Services had been patched but that I had to restart my nodes (reboot the clusters) to complete the operation. The first thing you need to know is that, when things like this happens, the Azure platform creates a file called /var/run/reboot-required in each of the nodes of your cluster.

After collaborating with the Azure Ansible container I decided to also develop a Developer Container for those who want or need to use the Azure Blockchain Development Kit for Ethereum to create smart contracts, taking away the burden of installing Python, Truffle, Ganache and NodeJS on your machine. Once again I collaborated with Chuck Lantz and the container definition resulted in the following two files:

Last year I was working on a project for deploying Azure services using Ansible, and let me tell you something: Back then a feature like Visual Studio Remote Containers would have helped us so much! Why? Because just installing Visual Studio Code, the Remote Development Extension Pack, and Docker you have a killer combo that makes it possible to create a Development environment in a snap and share it with your source code.

Recently I had to update a bunch of Log Analytics Workspaces resources to enable the Container Monitoring Solution. So I came up with this ARM Template that I want to share with you: { "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#", "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0", "parameters": { "LogAnalyticsWorkspaceName": { "type": "string", "metadata": { "description": "Log Analytics Workspace name" } } }, "variables": { "workspaceResourceId": "[resourceId('Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces/', parameters('LogAnalyticsWorkspaceName'))]", "containerSolutionName": "[concat(parameters('LogAnalyticsWorkspaceName'), '-containers')]" }, "resources": [ { "type": "Microsoft.OperationsManagement/solutions", "apiVersion": "2015-11-01-preview", "name": "[variables('containerSolutionName')]", "location": "[resourceGroup().location]", "plan": { "name": "[variables('containerSolutionName')]", "product": "[concat('OMSGallery/', 'ContainerInsights')]", "promotionCode": "", "publisher": "Microsoft" }, "properties": { "workspaceResourceId": "[variables('workspaceResourceId')]" } } ], "outputs": {} } Hope it helps!

Next Saturday the Global Azure Bootcamp will be celebrated all over the world and as in previous years their will be a Science Lab where we’ll try to discover a planet!!!. Isn’t that cool? Well to make this fast you can run the Science Lab using Azure Container Instances following the instructions found here or you can use the following gist to run the workload in an existing kubernetes cluster:

If you install the Azure Application Gateway Ingress Controller for your AKS clusters you may want to expose more than one service through the same Public IP just changing the url path. In order to make this work you must use the backend-path-prefix annotation. In the following sample I create an ingress with the following behavior:

In order to deploy a Persistent Volume in your AKS cluster using an existing Storage Account you should take the following steps: Create a Storage Class with a reference to the Storage Account. Create a Secret with the credentials used to access the Storage Account. Create a Persistent Volume with a reference to the Storage Class, the secret and the File Share. Create a Persistent Volume Claim with a reference to the volume by name. Use the following yaml as a template for the resources described above. Save the contents as aks-existing-storage-account-pv.yaml: