A scenario-based tutorial for Azure Kubernetes Service – Part 2

9th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com.

Introduction

In this blog, we will dig a little deeper into Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). What better way to do this than by building an AKS cluster ourselves! Just a heads-up, I will be using terminology that was introduced in part 1 of this mini-blog series. If you haven’t read it, or need a refresher, you can access it at https://blog.kloud.com.au/2019/03/04/a-scenario-based-tutorial-for-azure-kubernetes-service-part-1/

Let’s start by describing the AKS cluster architecture.… [Keep reading] “A scenario-based tutorial for Azure Kubernetes Service – Part 2”

Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 1

21st of November, 2018 / / 2 Comments 
22 Nov 18 Part 2 is available here that details accessing
the Docker Image via Azure Cloud Shell / SSH
27 Nov 18 Part 3 is available here that details customizing
an image and accessing it via other SSH clients with 
elevated access.

PowerShell Desktop Virtual Environments

If you’ve been working with PowerShell for any length of time you know that through its flexibility there can come challenges when using disparate PowerShell Modules and often their version dependencies.… [Keep reading] “Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 1”

Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services

22nd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Similar to other cloud platforms, Azure is starting to leverage containers to provide flexible managed environments for us to run Applications. The App Service on Linux being such a case, allows us to bring in our own home-baked Docker images containing all the tools we need to make our Apps work.
This service is still in preview and obviously has a few limitations:

… [Keep reading] “Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services”

Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair

21st of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Container security is (or should be) a concern to anyone running software on Docker Containers. Gone are the days when running random Images found on the internet was common place. Security guides for Containers are common now: examples from Microsoft and others can be found easily online.
The two leading Container Orchestrators also offer their own security guides: Kubernetes Security Best Practices and Docker security.

Container Image Origin

One of the single biggest factors in Container security is determined by the origin of container Images:

  1. It is recommended to run your own private Registry to distribute Images
  2. It is recommended to scan these Images against known vulnerabilities.
… [Keep reading] “Static Security Analysis of Container Images with CoreOS Clair”

Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis

10th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Service discovery and hot reconfiguration is a common problem we face in cloud development nowadays. In some cases we can rely on an orchestration engine like Kubernetes to do all the work for us. In other cases we can leverage a configuration management system and do the orchestration ourselves. However, there are still some cases where either of these solutions are impractical or just too complex for the immediate problem… and you don’t have a Consul cluster at hand either :(.… [Keep reading] “Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis”

Build from source and package into a minimal image with the new Docker Multi-Stage Build feature

5th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Confd is a Golang written binary that can help us make configuration files dynamic. It achieves this by providing a templating engine that is driven by backend data stores like etcd, consul, dynamodb, redis, vault, zookeeper.

https://github.com/kelseyhightower/confd

A few days ago I started putting together a BYO load-balancing PoC where I wanted to use confd and Nginx. I realised however that some features that I needed from confd were not yet released. Not a problem; I was able to compile the master branch and package the resulting binary into an Nginx container all in one go, and without even having Golang installed on my machine.… [Keep reading] “Build from source and package into a minimal image with the new Docker Multi-Stage Build feature”

SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379

3rd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Redis Cache is an advanced key-value store that we should have all come across in one way or another by now. Azure, AWS and many other cloud providers have fully managed offerings for it, which is “THE” way we want to consume it.  As a little bit of insight, Redis itself was designed for use within a trusted private network and does not support encrypted connections. Public offerings like Azure use TLS reverse proxies to overcome this limitation and provide security around the service.… [Keep reading] “SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379”

Running Containers on Azure

1st of August, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Running Containers in public cloud environments brings advantages beyond the realm of “fat” virtual machines: easy deployments through a registry of Images, better use of resources, orchestration are but a few examples.
Azure is embracing containers in a big way (Brendan Burns, one of the primary instigators of Kubernetes while at Google, joined Microsoft last year which might have contributed to it!)
Running Containers nowadays is almost always synonymous with running an orchestrator which allows for automatic deployments of multi-Container workloads.… [Keep reading] “Running Containers on Azure”

Azure API Management Step by Step – Use Cases

23rd of September, 2016 / / No Comments

jorge-fotoUse Cases

On this second post about Azure API management, let’s discuss about use cases. Why “Use Cases”?                  

Use cases helps to manage complexity, since it focuses on one specific usage aspect at the time. I am grouping and versioning use cases to facilitate your learning process and helping to keep track with future changes. You are welcome to use these diagrams to demonstrate Azure API management features.

API On-boarding is a key aspect of API governance and first thing to be discussed. … [Keep reading] “Azure API Management Step by Step – Use Cases”