devops

This week I had to repeat the process of creating a Service Principal in order to use the Microsoft.Azure.Management.Fluent lib with .NET Core so I decided it was time to script the process. With the following script you can Create a Service Principal and write required parameters to a .azureauth file.

HDInsight: Scale Horizontally with Scale-HDInsightClusterNodes.ps1 a PowerShell workflow that will help you automate the process of scaling your cluster. The script receives 4 parameters: ResourceGroupName: The name of the resource group where the cluster resides ClusterName: The name of your HDInsight cluster Nodes: The number of nodes you want for the cluster ConnectionName: The name of your automation connection account and requires the following PowerShell modules: AzureRM.Profile, AzureRM.HDInsight

Recently I client ask me to enable application and http logging for more than 20 AzureRM Web Apps. Furthermore the client wanted the logs to be stored in a Storage Account. Issues started when I decided to Use PowerShell to Enable Logging for Azure RM Web Apps, because there is no equivalent to the ASM Enable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic cmdlet for ARM resources.

Last Thursday I started reading the Free eBook: “Containerized Docker Application Lifecycle with Microsoft Tools and Platform” by Cesar de la Torre. The book is really easy to read and really gives the reader a glimpse on the way to approach the overall application lifecycle when using containers and Microsoft Technologies. One of the interesting things he mentions is the ability to debug your source code inside a container using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code, so I decided to try it out and Debug ASP.NET Core on Docker with Visual Studio Code

Stop or Start all WebApps in your Azure subscription with Stop-Start-All-WebApps.ps1 a simple PowerShell workflow runbook that will help you automate the process of stopping or starting every single WebApp (Website) you’ve deployed. The script receives two required parameters: Stop: If set to true stop the WebApps (Websites) otherwise start the WebApps (Websites) CredentialAssetName: The name of a valid Credential Asset (AutomationPSCredential) you must have previously configured. As you can see below, the script is quite simple and uses the following PowerShell Activities and Cmdlets:

Backup your Team Services Git Repositories with VSTS Vault: A simple windows service or console application designed to keep a local copy of all your code. Since January 2016 we’ve moved the source code of more than 30 projects to Git repositories hosted by Visual Studio Team Services. Moving to the cloud has some downsides and one thing that kept us thinking was the need to be sure that in the event of an internet connection failure or a Team Services outage we would be able to access our code and deploy hot fixes for our applications as part of our data protection plan.

In this post I’ll just show the list of PowerShell commands needed to Create an Azure Site to Site VPN and give you some tips when using a Check Point Security Gateway. First things first! so if you have not installed and configured Azure PowerShell go for it: How to install and configure Azure PowerShell

One of the great things about Azure is the possibility to Export Azure Resource Groups Templates. Each template is a json file containing the exact configuration of the services you’ve provisioned in a Resource Group. Using this templates you can treat your Infrastructure as code and repeatedly deploy your application during every stage of the application lifecycle in the same way, each and every time.

For the last couple of months I’ve been using Application Insights to monitor, detect and diagnose performance issues in our applications. Last week I noticed that the Analytics button on the Application Insights blade was working: Once you click it, your browser will open the Application Insights Analytics page with the following taxonomy:

Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that a lot of companies are trying to hire DevOps Engineers or DevOps Experts and I have to ask what are these companies looking for? Reading some of the job descriptions I found out that some are looking for experts on the tooling associated with infrastructure automation such as Chef or Puppet while others search for Developers with infrastructure knowledge.

Since the year started I’ve been working hard with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) with Git as source control. I was getting tired of entering my git credentials on each clone, pull or push, on Windows or Mac OS X, so this weekend I decided to surf the web and look for a multi-platform solution.

I had the luck to end last year as speaker on an expert panel in IASA Spain’s latest session about ALM trends and challenges, where we spent the morning talking about, amazing ALM tools, DevOps, People and Emotions. We all know about organizations where designers, developers, testers, operations, security and support work in isolation with minimal or no collaboration at all, having each team in its own functional silo, allowing people to ignore the consequences of their actions.