Yesterday I attended HashiDays London, which was an awesome day of sessions covering numerous HashiCorp Products. In particular, the Terraform, Boundary, Vault and Consul updates and sessions were really interesting, and I left with a huge list of things that I’ll be testing out in my lab in the coming weeks! You can catch up on sessions on-demand if you […]
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Last week I had the pleasure of attending Experts Live Netherlands 2023, and presenting a session called “Exploring the benefits of Azure Virtual WAN“. The event brought together people throughout the Microsoft Community, and covered a wide range of topics and sessions – it was a brilliant event, and one I’d recommend to anyone keen to learn more and network! […]
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As a follow on from my last post, I wanted to explore using Packer to create images for Azure Lab Services in more detail. Specifically, how images created using Packer could be imported into Azure Lab Services. If you’re new to Azure Lab Services, I’d recommend reading my previous post on it. Why use Packer with Azure Lab Services? This […]
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Overview Recently I have been using Azure Lab Services to prepare Lab Environments for testing and training scenarios, and also using various tools to help create and customise these environments as I need. Azure Lab Services provides on-demand or scheduled access to virtual machines to support various scenarios. A summary of the key points is below: Provide access to Virtual […]
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On Friday last week Jon Jarvis and myself hosted our first Cloud Chat Monthly Session. As this was our first session, we started off with an introduction to Cloud Chat Monthly, talked about our goals and objectives, and then went into our first technical session – “Unleashing the Power of Code-Driven Virtual Desktop Deployments: AVD & Windows 365“. Upcoming April […]
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✅ I recently gained access to the new Bing AI Service – and decided to put it to the test for learning new skills, and testing out how it might impact some of the things I do regularly. What is Bing AI? Bing AI is the artificial intelligence technology that powers Bing search engine and its related products and services. […]
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A recent topic of conversation with colleagues, friends in the technical community, and customers I work with, has been how I manage and deploy lab environments. I have to regularly deploy lab environments both for my own use (learning, training, etc.), and for customer demos – and often need to spin up/down these environments with little notice, relying on as […]
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As you may know, I maintain a range of Terraform environments for Azure, which can be used for Demos, Labs, Learning and Testing. These are maintained within my GitHub Repo, and I have occasionally also blogged about updates to these environments: https://jakewalsh.co.uk/updates-to-my-terraform-azure-base-lab-environments/. ✅ Just want the Code or Module? Click here: Code / Module Overview: I’ve recently been updating one […]
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Recently I had the pleasure of presenting a CUGC User Share Webinar on an Introduction to Terraform. I specifically chose to focus on using Terraform with Azure (as this is an area I regularly work within). ✅ https://mycugc.org/events/details/cugc-global-presents-user-share-an-introduction-to-terraform/ Within this webinar I covered off the following areas: What is Terraform? How Terraform works What is Infrastructure as Code? Why use Infrastructure […]
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Please note: This tooling has been renamed and updated since this post was written – please see updated docs in the GitHub Repo here. Azure Terrafy is a tool that allows us to bring existing Azure Infrastructure under management by Terraform – something those of us using Terraform have been hoping will exist for a long time. When we say “under […]
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Using a programmatic approach to creating images is a great way to ensure consistency and standardise your approach. By using a tool like Packer, we can do this reliably, and integrate the build process into existing DevOps Pipelines and deployments. At the current time, there are two Packer Azure Builders; azure-arm and azure-chroot – for this post, we will use […]
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Recently I have been working to create some Terraform Modules, which allow repeated deployment of Azure Resources. One of these modules is designed to create Identity Resources, based on the Cloud Adoption Framework. I wanted to create something that could be used to repeatedly deploy these Resources across however many Azure Regions are required, and expanded to include additional Resources […]
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