tl;dr: Azure API bug renders Terraform helpless to manage FrontDoor and several other Azure services. Both companies publicly say they’re working on it. Meanwhile, customers are stuck. Read on for more details.

Hey all!

Normally the focus of my articles is on how to build something. I focus on how to combine different technologies, or how process and platform can do some great things for your team.

This one will be different — it’s about a sneaky bug we’ve found in Azure’s FrontDoor resource API, and how both Azure and Hashi are thus far refusing to budge in fixing it. …

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all!

In my last post we discussed what Ansible AWX/Tower is and how powerful it can be. We also went over how to build and deploy AWX to a local instance with Vagrant in less than 10 minutes.

So assuming you followed along, you now have a version of AWX running. Woot!

However, AWX/Tower isn’t a very intuitive software in my opinion, and it can help to get some help getting started.

The first thing I want to focus on building is dynamic inventories. …

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Ansible is a flexible and powerful tool that permits tasks to be written in plain YAML language and can do some amazing things.

You can run Ansible from any Unix-like computer, including macOS, but not Windows (sorry Windows users). However, there are some major limitations to running on your own computer compared with running from a central platform attached to a CI/CD.

Let’s spend some time talking about the problems you’ll need to tackle with Ansible on your local computer, and how AWX/Tower can do better. …

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all!

This guide walks through how to bring up Ansible AWX (the upstream open-source version of RedHat’s Ansible Tower) on your local computer using Vagrant. This can be great to play with AWX and test it. You could also use this ephemeral AWX instance on your workstation to build some what-if scenarios without spending a dime or touching any production infrastructure.

First, let’s talk about what AWX is and how Vagrant can help us effortlessly build this instance. …

Hey all,

I came to DevOps by the unusual path of network engineering. Tons of fun, and I got to rub shoulders with all sorts of business owners, InfoSec teams, and even some high-performance application owners.

I have a broad respect for network technologies — it’s forgotten, but like most foundational technology, we wouldn’t get very far without it in place.

Cisco’s Umbrella does a great job at keeping computers safe. It grabs all DNS and sends it to the Umbrella (well now Cisco) cloud for filtering, where enterprise policies can be applied. …

Earlier this week I was excited to be invited to an early preview of HashiCorp’s first new product in a few years, HashiCorp Boundary. The NDA on releasing this information has now been released, and I want to talk about nothing else. Let’s talk Boundary!

Boundary is the first new product from HashiCorp in the past several years and was announced at HashiConf2020. It is intended to modernize how network access is provided to both users and applications.

Boundary is intended to be one of the first in the Software-Defined Perimeter space. This type of tool is an organic outgrowth of the HashiCorp consul product’s service mesh and overlay networking but expands that mesh to include other types of machines, including user machines. …

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all!

I’ve written in the past about my trials and tribulations designing and running a terraform and general CI/CD platform that’s used by 10+ teams to run ~130 terraform pipelines to deploy to 50+ environments across Azure and AWS.

When designing the system, I knew that’d it’d need to scale up and out to a great degree — any pattern and solution we chose would be stressed both by upward growth (running terraform and other deploys hundreds of times per day) and outward (scaling out to hundreds or maybe thousands of pipelines and workflows). …

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all,

Coming off my long focus on Terraform and CI/CDs (see my profile page for my many articles) I took some time to relax. I had architected a broad solution, and now it was time to teach all the development and operations teams I work with about it.

I love that part of the job — architecting a great solution is only half the battle — you have to sell it to the groups as better than what they do now. So much better, in fact, that they’ll learn a whole new tool and process, a non-trivial ask of operations and development teams that are busier than ever. …