Infrastructure – AzureDays

Understanding Kubernetes workload node objects

December 9, 2020

Kubernetes has a variety of objects to manage your cluster and your applications. Your applications run in workload nodes (virtual machines) and the containers are managed by the control plane.

You use manifests to tell the control plane how you want to configure your Kubernetes objects using manifests, and the control plane changes the state of the cluster to your desired state.

In other words, you tell the control plane how to configure the workload nodes with your containers, networking, security, and storage. And the control plane makes it happen.

In this article, learn the definitions of the workload objects. And learn some initial best practices to use when defining your Kubernetes objects.

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Walkthrough on how to handle merge conflicts in Git

July 21, 2020

Git is distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.The foundation of DevOps, begins with using source code control. This includes the source control for your Infrastructure as Code.But sometimes, when you check in your code, either you or someone else has been working made a change that creates a conflict between branches.

When the same part of the same file in two branches have been changed, Git won’t be able to figure out which version to use. When such a situation occurs, Git stope your right before the merge commit, where you will need to resolve the conflicts manually.

In this walkthrough, you set up a new repository, make changes to the repository where so changes conflict with those on your local machine, merge the changes, and push the changes to the repository.

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Cheatsheet and best practices for Git

July 16, 2020

Git is distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Git is a primary tool for both developers and cloud engineers who are moving to infrastructure as code. Git is the core of a modern version control software, which keeps track of every modification to the code in a special kind of database. If (dare I say “when”) a mistake is made, you can turn back the clock and compare earlier versions of the code to help fix the mistake while minimizing disruption to all team members.

You do not need to have your repository set up to get started with Git. Although you will want to set one up to save your changes and to manage your deployments. Learn more about how to set up your repositories in the previous post.

In this article, you will find a list of resources to use to learn how to get started with Git. The article provides some sample command in a pattern you will use for your code or your infrastructure as a code. There are also references on how to get started learning Git.

Or .. if you prefer you can use the Git Cheatsheet from GitHub. The contribution made in this blog post is to show you common patterns you will use daily.

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Walkthrough using Azure Policy to audit and enforce compliance

July 9, 2020

azpolicy Use Azure Policy to manage and enforce your standards for governance and compliance and to assess that compliance at scale. When you implement Azure Policy, you are effectively adding guard-rails for your users. But you also have a way to audit your organization compliance against a particular policy.

In this walkthrough, you will learn the implications of using a Policy in Azure. For this walkthrough, you will use Azure CLI to create a storage account that will not be compliant, but allowing its contents to be accessed using HTTP. Then you will add a Policy that requires HTTPS, and see how you can audit existing, non-compliant resource. You will audit the resource using the portal and using PowerShell script. Then you will create another non-compliant resource and see how Azure blocks the resource during creation.

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Understanding Azure Policy for regulatory compliance

July 7, 2020

azpolicy Use Azure Policy to manage and enforce your standards for governance and compliance and to assess that compliance at scale. The idea is to set standards and to be able to demonstrated your organization is meeting your regularoty compliance goals.

In previous blog posts, you learned about setting up Management Groups and Security Center. For management groups, you learned that policies can be applied across multiple subscriptions. You noticed that Security Center provides a set of policies (an an policy initiative) for your subscription.

In this post, learn the basics of Azure Policy for you to manage resource consistency, regulatory compliance, security, and cost. And how Policies can be grouped together as initiatives, and how you can assign initiatives to specific regulatory compliance goals.

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Setting up Management Group for production in enterprise

June 29, 2020

org1 Once you have set up your first subscription, you can set up your Management Group.

In Azure, management groups are a way to group your subscriptions. When you apply policies and governance to your management group, all of the subscriptions within a management group automatically inherit the conditions applied. Enterprises want management groups as a way to scale your operations no matter how many subscriptions you may have.

For example, you may want to restrict the regions available for your resources to those within a particular region. A policy that reflects that can be applied to a management group and will automatically be applied to all management groups, all subscriptions, and all resources under that management group.

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Setting up Security Center for production in enterprise

June 18, 2020

Security Center provides out of the box policies and a dashboard to identify possible security issues with your subscription.

To start with Security Center has a good set of policies that will help you do basic audits and provide security alerts.

Use Security Center to meet your cloud requirements

In this article, you will be able to meet the following requirements:

Set up ways for your security team, developers, and operations to quickly audit subscriptions.
Mitigate security issues

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Setting up Log Analytics workspace for production in enterprise

June 15, 2020

icon_1.0.1195.1535 Operations and security are central in any cloud deployment. It should be top of mind in each of your cloud deployments.

Enabling your operations team to find and fix errors, to build practices around scaling your data are essential to having a successful Azure data center.

Log Analytics provides a unified way to show what is happening across your Azure data center.

In this article learn how to set up Log Analytics to receive data from multiple Azure subscriptions, on premises virtual machines or other clouds. And learn to configure your Log Analytics workspace, set up role-based-access-control, and how to incorporate Log Analytics best practices. In addition, you will also learn how to get started with some important queries.

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Organize Azure resources using management group, tags, naming convention

June 10, 2020

org1 Once you have set up your Azure administrators, you can begin to consider how to organize your cloud into management groups, subscriptions, resource groups. You will want to develop a naming standard, and way to tag resources.

Although you may be focused initially on just getting your resources deployed, you will want to be able to manage them. For example, a year from now you may want to know who is responsible for the virtual machine that is no longer doing anything, but is costing money. In other words, you may want lifecycle management.

You may want the ability to charge a set of resources to a cost center and to budget those resources. For example, you may want to receive alerts for both the users and for your administrators when costs are out of line with expectations.

And as we all know, it is easier to organize as you go. In this article, you will learn about some key points in organizing your Azure resources.

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Setting up your enterprise Azure subscription administrators

June 4, 2020

azureadministratorpng Microsoft makes it easy to get started using Azure — sign up for a free subscription and get started. The tutorial show you how to use the portal to create virtual machines, storage, backups. All good.

And then it comes time to take your applications into production. You may realize that you need to show auditors your security methods. And you want to be sure to protect your customer data. Or you may have cloud sprawl and want to control costs.

And you have had a good conversations about your requirements. What then?

This article shows you how to get your subscription up and running using some important best practices for your administrators. It shows how to set up Security Center and how to set up policies that can be used to help your security team validate that you are using best practices.

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