Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 3

27th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

This is the third and likely last post in this series. In Part 1 I introduced the capability to have Virtual PowerShell Environments using Docker and the full Windows 10 / Server 2019 Build 1809 container images. In Part 2 I detailed remotely access the Azure RM Windows 10 / Server 2019 host that contains the Docker Container with our full Windows 1809 environment (and therefore PowerShell Desktop).

In this post I’ll detail building a Docker Image based off of the Windows 1809 Container image.… [Keep reading] “Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 3”

Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – Part 2

22nd of November, 2018 / / 1 Comment 
27 Nov 18 Part 3 is available here that details customizing 
an image and accessing it via other SSH clients with elevated
access.

In Part-1 of this series posted yesterday I showed that with Windows 10/Windows Server 2019 we can now have isolated virtual environments for PowerShell Desktop in Azure through containerization.

In this post I’ll show how I plan to leverage this capability from a mobility perspective. What we need to do first is enable elevated (privileged) access to our VM.… [Keep reading] “Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure – 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”

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”