In previous posts we looked at a basic example of creating Immutable Infrastructure via BitBucket Pipelines using Terraform as well as why we would want to use Immutable Infrastructure and what benefits it brings. However we didn’t look at how to extend the pipeline in to Configuration Management. We’re going to look at that now, leveraging Ansible within the pipeline to automatically configure the instances we create immediately after they . . .
Immutable Infrastructure became the new buzzword of DevOps teams a few years ago (around the time that Cattle Not Pets became the decisive philosophy of those same teams) and is one that makes perfect sense. In order for Infrastructure as Code mentalities to be properly executed we need to think of infrastructures (and in particular Cloud Infrastructure) less as nodes to be manually configured and more as abstract objects which . . .
Previously I’ve looked at Azure DevOps as a fantastic platform for deploying CI/CD pipelines, and it is, however it’s obvious inclination for Azure makes it something of an issue when trying to work on other public cloud providers, and Azure obviously isn’t the only game in town. There’s also the issue of complexity. Whilst Azure DevOps is incredibly flexible and powerful, this leads to complexity and we don’t always need . . .
In a complex Linux environment where multiple administrators have a requirement to manage countless machines (or even a small amount of machines), there is inevitably a requirement to manage SSH Private Keys, as well as the large administrative overhead that comes with cycling them when they expire, or new admins join or move teams. Vault offers us a method to remove the churn of key cycling. A fantastic feature of . . .
A useful function nested within Ansible is the ability to query remote REST APIs, return the JSON data, parse it and perform subsequent actions based on the data that your get back. When we make the subsequent action sending to a remote Webhook we can then make the function even more powerful (most of the time that is going to be sending a notification to a remote system to let . . .
Previously we’ve discussed the deployment of Docker containers to Azure and managing Scale Out of instances but not the use of Docker directly. The terminology of Docker has become a little confused of late as containers become the new hot topic, for clarity Docker itself is an application that can be used to create, manage and orchestrate containers, and it’s the orchestration that we’re going to be looking at in . . .
In a previous post we’ve looked at how to build Azure infrastructure with Terraform and handle sensitive secrets by storing them within Vault and looking them up at run time. This however still poses a problem if we’re using the default local backend for Terraform; particularly that these secrets will be stored in plain text in the resulting state files and in a local backend they will be absorbed in . . .
Previously I’ve looked in detail at the uses of two of Hashicorp’s offering’s; Terraform and Vault. Predictably, the union of these two platforms allows for some ideal ways to further streamline the process of cloud provisioning, in this case by securely handling the myriad secrets needed for cloud shaping and configuration. In this post I’ll be looking at a fairly simple configuration to get started. The sample code for this . . .
Even in the age of Linux dominance on public clouds, there’s no denying that Windows still rules the roost in on-premise deployments and Active Directory still lies at the heart of authentication schemes. AD is everywhere to the point where it’s a surprise for some admins to learn that LDAP and Kerberos aren’t native to Microsoft. Knowing that, it is often essential for a good product to provide LDAP authentication . . .
In my recent posts I’ve covered the hardened setup of Vault and covered the basics of using the REST API. As we’ve seen so far, Vault is primarily designed for programmatic interactions from external systems via the API, so lets take a look a favourite of mine; Ansible Tower, which is a prime candidate as a third party system which often has a requirement to call secrets from external systems. . . .