When establishing good security processes around your software release pipeline it’s important to ensure that secrets are handled with care. As a best practice, I always ensure secrets that need to be used in a CI / CD pipeline are stored in Key Vault and imported into an Azure DevOps Variable Group. This allows the … Continue reading Terraform + Azure DevOps Environment Variable Piping Tips
Azure Serverless Architecture Automation with Terraform Explained
Here is a higher level view of the architecture and all the things that Terraform is provisioning. Based on my previous post, we know that certain things still require manual intervention but Terraform can provision a lot of stuff: Resource Group Event Grid Topics (but no Topics Subscriptions due to Function Access Key limitation) CosmosDB … Continue reading Azure Serverless Architecture Automation with Terraform Explained
Challenges using Terraform with Azure Serverless Architecture
We’ve been exercising the AzureRM and AzureAD Terraform providers with a healthcare client who wants to go serverless with a new product they are building. We’ve been able to automate a significant portion of the infrastructure with relative ease, however, there are limitations to both the Terraform providers and the operational models of Azure Functions … Continue reading Challenges using Terraform with Azure Serverless Architecture
Configuring AzureAD provider in Terraform to manage App Registrations
Automating the provisioning of Application Registrations (i.e. App Registrations) can be a very useful way of organizing your application’s Infrastructure as Code. Keeping track of all these disparate app registrations, who they belong to, what they are for, can be very tedious and challenging. It can get messy very quickly as well and a wary … Continue reading Configuring AzureAD provider in Terraform to manage App Registrations
Xamarin UI Test Automation Android Setup
I guess my expectations are a bit high that when I install Visual Studio 2019 to include cross-platform mobile development (Xamarin.Forms) it would properly configure itself. It turns out that when you try and get UI Test Automation working with Xamarin.Forms that is just not the case. Let’s peel this onion. Missing ANDROID_HOME environment variable. … Continue reading Xamarin UI Test Automation Android Setup
Plex Server Setup – Part II: Making a Filesystem
After the clean install of ubuntu, I only had a 4GB OS partition setup for me. This partition lived on a single physical volume (PV), volume group (VG) and logical volume (LV). These are important concepts to understand Linux filesystem structures. The first step in expanding my storage is to create a separate logical volume … Continue reading Plex Server Setup – Part II: Making a Filesystem
Plex Server Setup – Part I: Resizing OS Volume
Full disclosure, as someone who’s spent most of his career designing and building software, I don’t often get the opportunity to tackle good old fashioned system administration tasks, especially on Linux. However, since my introduction to PLEX –an open source home media server—I’ve had more opportunities. I’ve recently acquired a new server that I plan … Continue reading Plex Server Setup – Part I: Resizing OS Volume
Building a SmartThings Automation
I’ve been digging into the SmartThings Automation platform a bit. Admittedly, I’m fumbling around a bit. 😊 According to the definitions in the documentation, I think I want to build a WebHook automation. As per the documentation, one should consider an “when the end-user configures the Automation to monitor an open/close sensor, the Automation subscribes … Continue reading Building a SmartThings Automation
Ready to Re:Invent 2018
I traversed the barren landscape and followed the AWS neck chains to the Venetian Sands Showroom to register for AWS Re:Invent 2018 last night. The Ping Pong tables and heavy beats were in full force. Love the geometric furniture this year! The registration was seamless but albeit on clunky HP laptops. Took my picture and … Continue reading Ready to Re:Invent 2018
Mocking Service Fabric & Azure Services with Dependency Injection vs. Inversion of Control (IoC)
In retrospect, in my youth as a software designer I recognize that I often had a preference for the technically elegant. This would sometimes override what was practical from a maintainability standpoint. I was recently asked about the Dependency Injection approach on a project and why we weren’t using an Inversion-of-Control (IoC) Container such as … Continue reading Mocking Service Fabric & Azure Services with Dependency Injection vs. Inversion of Control (IoC)
Sky Cliffs 