Video: How We use Terraform to Deploy Container-Driven Builders in Azure DevOps

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all! 

I have written lots of blogs (43 and counting!) under the heading “Let’s Do DevOps,” or simple, picture and code-heavy descriptions of how to succeed at many different modern DevOps tasks and architectures. 

In this video I give a talk to an internal company audience about how we have replaced our internal-facing CI/CD static ec2 builders with container-driven pools that are replaced after every job. 

These containers are rebuild from source nightly, and stored in one container registry location in one account, and a single secret in the Secrets Manager service in a single account stores the registration secret used by builders to register and start receiving jobs when they come up. 

There are tons of security and operational benefits with this model, and I hope you enjoy this discussion and overview of them. 

Thanks all. Good luck out there!

kyler

Podcast: Network Collective - A New Path for Certification

I was able to participate in a podcast discussion for NetworkCollective with Nick Russo and Craig Stansbury to discuss the new Cisco DevNet certifications and what it means for Cisco and the broader IT industry. Please listen in!

Find it here

HashiTalks2020: Enterprise Deployment to Azure and AWS in Azure DevOps

Hey all! 

Here's my #HashiTalks2020 presentation about my company's transition from single-cloud, single-devops to cloud agnostic Terraform and multicloud Azure DevOps, pipeline and infra-as-code environments. 

This deep dive video is 25 minutes long. 

https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/enterprise-deployment-to-azure-and-aws-in-azure-devops

If you have any notes or comments please let me know! 

Good luck out there!
kyler

Intro to TravisCI With Terraform

Picture-heavy walkthrough of building a TravisCI terraform pipeline. It does everything based on GitHub events.

• On a new PR created/updated: run a terraform validate and plan, report status back to GitHub.
• On a PR merge: run a terraform apply, deploy resources.

And it has a kickin' rainbow theme. What else could you ask for? Check it out:

https://medium.com/swlh/intro-to-travisci-with-terraform-80e65cf975fe

Paywall bypass: https://medium.com/swlh/intro-to-travisci-with-terraform-80e65cf975fe?source=friends_link&sk=814896cf82cdac07cba5c2e44c42941b

Azure DevOps YML Terraform Pipeline and Pre-Merge Pull Request Validation

tl;dr: Here’s YML code that will build an Azure DevOps pipeline that can be run automatically as part of pull request validation (pre-merge) and requires manual approval by definably admin groups in order to proceed to touch resources.

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps (ADO) is an incredibly powerful CI/CD platform that is being rapidly developed by $MSFT. However, as with any rapidly-evolving product, the documentation sometimes leaves something to be desired. I solved a few problems with the help of the Azure DevOps development team and I thought I’d share my solutions. Hope they help.

https://medium.com/swlh/azure-devops-yml-terraform-pipeline-and-pre-merge-pull-request-validation-6352b841376a

Bootstrapping Azure Cloud to Your Terraform CI/CD

Pairing Terraform with a CI/CD like Azure DevOps, Terraform Cloud, or GitHub Actions can be incredibly empowering. Your team can work on code simultaneously, check it into a central repo, and once code is approved it can be pushed out by your CI/CD and turned into resources in the cloud.

https://medium.com/swlh/bootstrapping-azure-cloud-to-your-terraform-ci-cd-f06ddd951f69

Intro to Cisco ASAv in AWS With Terraform

Cisco, the king of data center networking for 3 decades, is becoming increasingly less important in a cloud-first world. Cloud native networking at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud (GCP) aren’t great — there’s tons of opportunity, but Cisco has yet to fully commit to bringing their products to a cloud-first world, despite their new moniker as a “cloud-first” company.

https://medium.com/swlh/intro-to-cisco-asav-in-aws-with-terraform-7a76031aba98