When Software Attacks!

Useful links from The ART of Modern Azure Deployments

Within a few days of each other I spoke about Azure Resource Templates at both DDDNorth 2015 and Integration Mondays run by the Integration User Group. I’d like to thank all of you who attended both and have been very kind in your feedback afterwards. As promised, this post contains the useful links from my final slide. I’ve already written posts on much of the content covered in my talk. However, since I’m currently sat on a transatlantic flight you can expect a series of posts to follow this on topics such as objects in templates, outputs and references.

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

Speaking at CloudBurst in September

I’ve never been to Sweden, so I’m really looking forward to September, when I’ll be speaking at CloudBurst. Organised by the Swedish Azure User Group (SWAG – love it!), this conference is also streamed and recorded and the sessions will be available on Channel 9. The list of speakers and topics promise some high-quality and interesting sessions and I urge you to attend if you can, and tune in to the live stream if you can’t.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, August 23, 2015

Using the customScriptExtension in Azure Resource Templates

Documentation for using the customScriptExtension for Virtual Machines in Azure through Resource Templates is pretty much non-existent at time of writing, and the articles on using it through PowerShell are just plain wrong when it comes to templates. This post is accurate at time of writing and will show you how to deploy PowerShell scripts and resources to an Azure Virtual Machine through a Resource Template. The code snippet below shows a customScriptExtension pulled from one of my templates.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, August 23, 2015