This month I will be a guest speaker at the free Blacks In Technology Twin Cities chapter happy hour event. We will be having a tech career discussion. The topic is: “Destination Cloud – Pivoting Your Career in Tech with Steve Buchanan“.
When: The happy hour event will be on Wed, May 25, 2022, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Location: Modern Well, 2909 S Wayzata Blvd, Minneapolis, MN 55405.
Join us for an evening with me and moderator Brian Waters as we explore career pathways in the Digital Space. Here are topics we will explore:
Choosing an area of interest
Being Strategic & Intentional in Career Search & Growth
Transitioning into Different Tech Disciplines & Industries, and
Identifying tech trends on the horizon!
This event is both in-person and virtual. The in-person location is Modern Well, 2909 S Wayzata Blvd, Minneapolis, MN 55405 and the zoom link is below. I hope you can make it out to this event!
Today Pierre Roman (@wiredcanuck) Senior Cloud Advocate of Microsoft & myself (@buchatech) streamed “Introduction to Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes” on Learn Live. Here is what we covered in this session:
In this session, showed you how Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters can help customers like Contoso to optimize and simplify their operations. Here are the Learning objectives we covered:
Describe Kubernetes, Azure Arc, and Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes.
Connect Kubernetes clusters to Azure Arc.
Manage Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes clusters by using GitOps.
Integrate Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes cluster with Azure services like Azure Monitor and Azure Policy.
If you missed it don’t worry. 🙂 You can watch the playback on the Microsoft Developer YouTube channel here:
You can check out more Learn Live episodes on the:
I am very excited to be a part of a new Microsoft Azure Hybrid Cloud Study Hall series. This is a free fourteen-part weekly series that starts in April running through June.
In this study hall, you will learn how you can manage your on-premises, edge, and multi-cloud resources, and how you can deploy Azure services anywhere with Azure Arc and Azure Stack.
In this series, each session covers working with hybrid cloud resources using Azure services and hybrid cloud technologies. In these sessions we will:
Answer your questions live
Walk-through how to configure hybrid cloud resources
Walk-through how to deploy hybrid cloud resources
Walk-through how to manage hybrid cloud resources
In these sessions, together with you, we will work through Microsoft Learn modules focused on Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI.
We have a solid lineup of speakers from Microsoft and the community! And I will be co-delivering two sessions myself.
Some of the speakers and moderators
Check out this video Microsoft marketing made where I talk about the sessions:
My session will be with my friend and co-author of my latest book John Joyner.
Here are the session details:
Azure Arc: Extending Hyperscale Cloud Management to Your Datacenter
Description:
Learn about Microsoft’s Azure Arc service, a new multi-cloud management platform that belongs in every cloud or DevOps estate. The premise of Azure Arc is compelling: why not extend familiar management tools proven in Azure to on-premise and other cloud networks? A practical scenario-based tour will get you up to speed quickly, with instruction and demos that are heavy with hands-on experience. If your organization has resources across the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and edge environments, then this session is for you. You will learn how to configure and use Azure Arc to uniformly manage workloads across all of these environments.
What you will learn:
Introduces the basics of hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge computing and how Azure Arc fits into that IT strategy
Insights into Azure native management tooling for managing on-premises servers and extending to other clouds
Detail an end-to-end hybrid server monitoring scenario leveraging Azure Monitor and/or Microsoft Sentinel that is seamlessly delivered by Azure Arc
Define a blueprint to achieve regulatory compliance with industry standards using Azure Arc, delivering Azure Policy from Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Are you thinking about starting the cloud journey, or are you an experienced cloud engineer already? Come join this interactive session where we will talk all things cloud! We will have a round-table discussion about what resources are available, where to find them, and which ones are better than others. Talk with experienced cloud architects about the mistakes they’ve seen and how to avoid them. Come listen to stories, enjoy a few drinks, and have a great time talking about the cloud movement.
What you will learn:
How to begin your cloud adoption journey
What resources are available to start your migration process, and how to find them
This session will be an open format Q&A. Come ask your burning questions in front of a live audience and get real-time feedback from cloud MVP’s and SME’s. No question too hard, no topic off-limits. Wanted to know why something was built the way it was? Want to know how to accomplish something you’ve been working on for months? Have a general question about Azure in general? Come, listen, ask.
This was a fun podcast with Jez Ward, and Dave Chapman of Cloudreach. They run a podcast called Cloudbusting. On the podcast they focus on transformation, leadership, ways of working and emerging technology they explore the significant impact that cloud is having on people and businesses.
On this podcast episode, we set out to answer very important questions such as what are Jucy Lucy’s?, what are root Canals like today? oh, and yeah we also spend some time talking about what Containers, Kubernetes, & GitOps are and how they fit in the cloud.
With the growth of Kubernetes, the complexity & needs have also grown. IT Professionals need help with the operational & security challenges of managing Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds, on-premises, & the edge.
My new course will teach you how to use Rancher for multi-Kubernetes cluster management, streamlining Kubernetes cluster deployments, & unified multi-Kubernetes cluster app management. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of Rancher needed for multi-K8s cluster management.
There is a learning path on Pluralsight focused on Kubernetes management. This is my 3rd course in the Kubernetes Management path titled “Kubernetes Tooling and Techniques” on Pluralsight. My other courses in the path are: “GitOps: The Big Picture” and “Getting Started with Argo CD“. You can get to the path using this link: https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skills/kubernetes-tooling-and-techniques
I hope you find value in this new Getting Started with Rancher course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses related to Kubernetes and other topics!Â
I am excited to announce the next chapter in my career. It has been a long time coming, I am joining Microsoft (going to the mothership). I will be joining an elite team focused on Azure product improvement in one of the engineering orgs as a Principal Program Manager. I will be focused on improving Azure’s end-to-end open-source & Kubernetes experiences as well as working with multiple clouds. Several things excite me about this role such as; the talented folks on the team, being a part of improving the Azure, continuing to expand my open-source skills, continuing to expand my multi-cloud skills, and working with various product groups as well as leadership.
I am really looking forward to this change in my career as I will be moving from the consulting discipline to the product/cloud provider discipline. I view this as a soft reboot to my career, the next chapter in my book, and the 3rd lap in the race of my career. The possibilities where this will lead are endless and will open many new doors.
With this move, I will no longer be a Microsoft MVP. Microsoft employees cannot be Microsoft MVPs. After 10 years as a Microsoft MVP, I will surely miss being a part of the MVP family. However, I will continue to contribute to the technical community through blogging, speaking at conferences, user groups, creating content such as e-books, sharing my insights on podcasts, and creating more Pluralsight courses! Sharing my knowledge is a part of who I am. Buchatech will live on! I look forward to working with folks from the other side of the table and continuing to interact/collaborate with folks in the community!
Today my 13th course was published on Pluralsight! This course covers MuleSoft. API’s are everywhere today where technology is used. API’s are the glue behind the technologies we all use. The app you use on your phone, those videos you stream from home, the software you use at work all have API’s powering them connecting across many systems. With the increased amount of applications needed to run enterprises today the need for API integrations has increased along with the complexity.
MuleSoft has been a leader for some time in the API space. For anyone in technology, it is a good idea to gain an understanding of API’s and learning MuleSoft is one way to do that. Check out my course MuleSoft 4: The Big Picture.
This course will teach you how MuleSoft and the Anypoint platform can be utilized as a key part of your enterprise API strategy. You’ll learn about MuleSoft and the Anypoint platform as an end-to-end API solution. First, you’ll explore what MuleSoft and Anypoint are. Next, you’ll discover the various Anypoint platform components. Finally, you’ll learn how to build APIs & Integrations. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of MuleSoft needed to recommend and architect a solution for your API needs.
I hope you find value in this new MuleSoft 4: The Big Picture course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses!Â
Argo CD is a GitOps operator and the goal of it is to be able to deploy apps to Kubernetes. In the majority of cases, we want to use Argo CD to deploy apps to many clusters.
Argo CD itself is deployed as a set of pods on a Kubernetes cluster. By default with an Argo CD deployment, the cluster it is running on is set as “in-cluster” (https://kubernetes.default.svc). When apps are configured for deployment a Kubernetes Cluster under Destination is required. They can be deployed to either the “in-cluster” K8s cluster or an external K8s cluster.
In order to deploy apps to an external Kubernetes cluster, you will need to register an external K8s cluster with Argo CD.
If you want to see the clusters you have registered with your Argo CD one way is through the web UI. Once you log in navigate to Settings and then Clusters to see them.
You can also see the clusters you have in the Argo CD CLI. To use the Argo CD CLI you need to log into the Argo CD API Server as shown in the following screenshot.
To see what clusters are registered from the CLI you can run
argocd cluster list
You will notice that you will only see the In-Cluster K8s cluster until you add an external one. Also, note that you are not able to register a new K8 cluster in the Argo CD web UI. You can only register a new K8s cluster from the Argo CD CLI. Within the Argo CD web UI you can delete the default in-cluster K8s cluster. This is not recommended.
If you click on the In-Cluster K8s cluster you can modify some settings of the in-cluster K8s cluster in the Argo CD web UI such as the name of it and its namespace. Not useful when you want to have more control over the settings around the K8s cluster you will be deploying apps to.
In my example, my Azure subscription has two AKS clusters. You can see this in the following screenshot. The arriving-gelding-k8s cluster is my In-Cluster object in Argo CD. The selected-worm-k8s is not my In-Cluster so I want to add this one to my Argo CD.
To add the new external cluster run use the following steps.
Step 1: Add your target K8s cluster to ArgoCD via the context in your kubectl config.
-For AKS you can simply log into your Azure subscription from VS Code on your computer and then run
az aks get-credentials –resource-group RGNAME –name AKSCLUSTERNAME
This will add the context for your AKS cluster to your kubeconfig file.
Step 2: List the K8 cluster contexts in your current kubeconfig file to ensure your target cluster has been added. Do this by locally running:
kubectl config get-contexts -o name
Step 3: Install a Service Account (argocd-manager), into the kube-system namespace of your kubeconfig file context:
argocd cluster add CONTEXTNAME
It will look like this:
After completing the previous steps you can run argocd cluster list again or go into the portal. You will see your new cluster added.
That wraps up this blog post. Now you should be able to deploy to more than just your In-Cluster Kubernetes cluster. Check back soon for more posts on Argo CD, GitOps, Kubernetes, and Azure topics.
In my last post on Argo CD with AKS, I mentioned the next post would explore deploying an app via Argo CD. Well, in this post we are going to do just that. I am going to walk through deploying an app from Argo CD to AKS. Note this same process would work for any Kubernetes cluster. This is not going to be a long post as the process is straightforward.
First of all, you can deploy an app from the Argo CD web UI or CLI. Ready your application in a Git-based repository. It does not matter what source control system you use for your repository as long as it is Git-based. You can use Azure DevOps, Gitlab, Bit Bucket etc. In my case I use GitHub. To deploy an app you need to point to a Git repository of either K8s manifest, Helm, or Kustomize. In this blog post I am going to keep it simple and use the Hello K8s app from Paul Bouwer. Ok, now let’s jump in.
Here are the steps for Deploying an App to Argo CD within the Web UI:
In the Argo CD web UI ensure you are on the Applications page
Click the + NEW APP button
Give the app the namehellok8s, use the project default (I used a dev project in my example), select Automatic for the sync policy, check AUTO-CREATE NAMESPACE
You can view the resources in AKS now. In the following screenshot you can see the deployment, pods, and service of a load balancer type.
You can also speed things up by deploying your app via the Argo CD CLI. This will accomplish the same goal as you would deploying the app via the Argo CD Web UI.
