When Software Attacks!

Creating Website Slots and SQL Elastic Pools using Azure Resource Templates

Recently I have been helping a number of organisations automate the deployment of their applications to Azure and came across a couple of scenarios that were not documented: Deploying an App Services web site with slots and SQL connection string settings, and the creation of a SQL Elastic Pool. Of those, the SQL Elastic Pool I found to be written up already by Vincent-Philipe Lauzon and all credit to him - my template draws on his excellent article.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, January 18, 2017

My Resource Templates from demos are now on GitHub

I’ve had a number of people ask me if I can share the templates I use in my Resource Template sessions at conferences. It’s taken me a while to find the time, but I have created a repo on GitHub and there is a new Visual Studio solution and deployment project with my code. One very nice feature that this has enabled me to provide is the same ‘Deploy to Azure’ button as you’ll find in the Azure Quickstart Templates.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 26, 2016

Convert new VM’s dynamic IP address to static with Azure Resource Templates

Over the past few posts on this blog I’ve been documenting the templates I have been working on for Black Marble. In a previous sequence I showed how you can use nested deployments to keep your templates simple and still push out complex environments. The problem with those examples is that they are very fixed in what they do. The templates create a number of virtual machines on a virtual network, with static IP addresses for each machine.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015

Optimising IaaS deployments in Azure Resource Templates

Unlike most of my recent posts this one won’t have code in it. Instead I want to talk about concepts and how you should look long and hard at your templates to optimise deployment. In my previous articles I’ve talked about how nested deployments can help apply sensible structure to your deployments. I’ve also talked about things I’ve learned around what will successfully deploy and what will give errors. Nested deployments are still key, but the continuous cycle of improvements in Azure means I can change my information somewhat around what works well and what is likely to fail.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015

Using Objects in Azure Resource Templates

Over the past few weeks I’ve been refactoring and improving the templates that I have been creating for Black Marble to deploy environments in Azure. This is the first post of a few talking about some of the more advanced stuff I’m now doing. You will remember from my previous posts that within an Azure Resource Template you can define parameters and variables, then use those for the configuration values within your resources.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015

Using References and Outputs in Azure Resource Templates

As you work more with Azure Resource Templates you will find that you need to pass information from one resource you have created into another. This is fine if you had the information to begin with within your variables and parameters, but what if it’s something you cannot know before deploy, such as the dynamic IP address of your new VM, or the FQDN of your new public IP address for your service?

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, November 1, 2015

Complex Azure Odyssey Part Four: WAP Server

Part One of this series covered the project itself and the overall template structure. Part Two went through how I deploy the Domain Controller in depth. Part Three talks about deploying my ADFS server and in this final part I will show you how to configure the WAP server that faces the outside world. The Template The WAP server is the only one in my environment that faces the internet. Because of this the deployment is more complex.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, August 30, 2015

Complex Azure Template Odyssey Part Three: ADFS Server

Part One of this series covered the project itself and the overall template structure. Part Two went through how I deploy the Domain Controller in depth. This post will focus on the next server in the chain: The ADFS server that is required to enable authentication in the application which will eventually be installed on this environment. The Template The nested deployment template for the ADFS server differs little from my DC template.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, August 30, 2015

An Introduction To Azure Resource Templates

I have spent a good deal of time over the last month or two building an Azure Resource Template to deploy a relatively complicated IaaS environment. In doing so I’ve hit a variety of problems along the way and I though that a number of blog posts were in order to share what I’ve learned. I will write a detailed post on certain specific servers within the environment shortly. This post will describe Azure Resource Template basics, problems I hit and some decisions I made to overcome issues.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, August 23, 2015

Complex Azure Template Odyssey Part One: The Environment

Part Two | Part Three | Part Four Over the past month or two I’ve been creating an Azure Resource Template to deploy and environment which, previously, we’d created old-style PowerShell scripts to deploy. In theory, the Resource Template approach would make the deployment quicker, easier to trigger from tooling like Release Manager and make the code easier to read. The aim is to deploy a number of servers that will host an application we are developing.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, August 23, 2015