Lately, I have been working on a lot of migrations from CI/CD environments of Azure Pipelines to GitHub Actions. I have been working with both tools for quiet some time now and I would like to share what I learned along the way.

One of the first things IT departments do when they start moving workloads to the cloud, is stopping their VMs on a regular basis to safe money. There are plenty of functions and ways to do this, but I thought, a different approach might be fun too - building this as a micro service with several components on Azure.

Introduction

To distribute Microsoft Store Apps in the company, it is recommended to use the Microsoft Store for Business. This allows you to set up your own business store based on Microsoft (and sideload) apps.

Using Terraform has become mainstream at this point and I would like to share with you, how I like to structure my deployments.

When working with internal container deployments, there are many cases, where applications need to access an internal HTTPS service. If these services use internal certificates from an internal certificate authority (CA), the client (container/pod) needs to trust the certificate chain including the Sub/Issuing CA certificate and the Root CA certificate.
These certificates have to be added to the trusted ROOT CA store, which should not be done at runtime (hence not with a sidecar container or similar constructs). The solution to this problem would be to add them at build time. We will discover how this process can be simplified and automated by using Azure Container Registry (ACR) tasks.

This topic is not new and quite frankly, it is hard to believe this is still not integrated yet, but at some point, during your cloud journey, you probably want to send monitoring alerts to a certain Teams channel. Even though this is functionality is available for plenty of other services, Azure Monitor still lacks this.

HashiCorp introcuded with Vault version 1.2 a new integrated Storage backend. It went into general availability with version 1.4 in April 2020. In November HashiCorp released Vault version 1.6 which includes further enhancements of the Raft storage backend. I took this opportunity to show how to create and restore Raft storage backend snapshots and share this with the community.

Continuing the Azure Image Builder Series, we take a closer look at performing image network security customizations using an externally hosted Shell script, enforcing a password policy, installing a specific docker version and finally deploying the image to a Azure Shared Images Gallery.

Azure Image Builder is a virtual machine image provisioning service on Microsoft Azure based on HashiCorp Packer. It has been designed to integrate natively with Microsoft Azure to allow customers to easily create and maintain virtual machine images for consistent deployments. This post is the first of a series to introduce the Azure Image Builder and its benefits by means of showing real-world examples.

The Secret Management Solution HashiCorp Vault allows the Integration of a variety of Identity Providers. Although currently no direct Implementation for Human Users of Azure AD exists, the JWT/OIDC Auth Method provides a way to enable authentication and authorization for Azure AD Users to HashiCorp Vault. This post shows how to configure HashiCorp Vault to enable User Login with Azure AD Credentials as well as assigning Permissions/Policies based on their Group Memberships.