20th Pluralsight Course Published – “Getting Started with Drupal”

Last week I published a new course on Pluralsight. This one is a milestone as it marks my 20th course! This course is titled “Getting Started with Drupal“. Startups, enterprises and more continue to adopt content management systems at a fast rate with Drupal being one of the top Content Management Systems used.

Drupal is one of the top choices for startups and enterprises. It is used for many uses from web apps, marketing tools, e-commerce, and even a company’s main website.

I have been working with Drupal and other content management systems in various aspects for over sixteen years. I have used Drupal for my own websites, hosted it for businesses, administered Drupal sites for customers, Drupal development for customers, and even managed the development of Drupal modules. With all of my history with Drupal, I was excited when the opportunity came up to build a course about it.

This course is ideal for bloggers, entrepreneurs, Product Managers, Marketing managers, Marketing executives, Marketing consultants, Marketing employees, web developers, project managers, business analysts, web designers, graphic designers, UX/UI, designers, and anyone interested in content management systems specifically Drupal.

This course will take you from little to no knowledge of Drupal to a place where you can be confident enough to get started. Whether you want to create a personal blog, a business website, or an online store, Drupal is a skill you should have and this course has you covered.

In this course, Getting Started with Drupal, you’ll learn its many uses, features, tech stack, and you’ll also explore hosting it. Next, you’ll learn how to install it. Finally, you’ll discover its user interface and general configuration.

Some of the major topics that are covered in this course include:

  1. Core Drupal knowledge.
  2. About its tech stack such as web servers like Apache, language PHP, Composer, Drush, & databases like MySQL & how these work with Drupal.
  3. How to acquire a domain & hosting for Drupal.
  4. & Finally, how to install and configure Drupal.

By the end of this course, you will have a better understanding of content management systems, & Drupal itself, its uses, features, & tech stack. As well as knowledge of how to get a domain name, hosting, and install Drupal along with a tour of its interface and general configuration.

This course is the 1st in a Drupal Path named “Drupal Fundamentals” on Pluralsight. The 2nd course in the path is “Drupal 10 Site Administration”. You can check out the full path here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/paths/drupal-fundamentals

Check out the “Getting Started with Drupal“ course here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/drupal-getting-started

I hope you find value in this new Getting Started with Drupal course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow me:

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/steve-buchanan

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Azure Arc Book Published

I am excited to kick off the new year announcing that my 8th book has been published! This book is “Azure Arc-Enabled Kubernetes and Servers“.

I had the honor to co-author this book with a long-time friend and fellow Microsoft MVP John Joyner. This is John’s latest book since his last 8 years ago!

The forward was written by Thomas Maurer a former MVP and now Microsoft Azure Evangelist. This book was reviewed by fellow Microsoft MVP Adnan Hendricks and a chapter contributed by a buddy of mine Fred Limmer.

This book covers an exciting technology from Microsoft exploring Azure Arc-Enabled Kubernetes and Servers. This book is for DevOps professionals, system administrators, security professionals, cloud admins, and IT professionals that are responsible for servers or Kubernetes clusters both on-premises and in the cloud.

Author copies!

This book covers:

  • Introduces the basics of hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge computing and how Azure Arc fits into that IT strategy
  • Teaches the fundamentals of Azure Resource Manager, setting the reader up with the knowledge needed on the technology that underpins Azure Arc
  • Offers insights into Azure native management tooling for managing on-premises servers and extending to other clouds
  • Details an end-to-end hybrid server monitoring scenario leveraging Azure Monitor and/or Azure Sentinel that is seamlessly delivered by Azure Arc
  • Defines a blueprint to achieve regulatory compliance with industry standards using Azure Arc, delivering Azure Policy from Azure Defender for Servers
  • Explores how Git and GitHub integrate with Azure Arc; delves into how GitOps is used with Azure Arc
  • Empowers your DevOps teams to perform tasks that typically fall under IT operations
  • Dives into how to best use Azure CLI with Azure Arc

You can order the book and watch for its official release here:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1484277678

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HashiCorp – Terraform Certified Associate exam & Study Guide

Yesterday HashiCorp announced their Terraform and Vault certification exams have gone public! This is exciting news for those that want to get certified on these technologies. Here is the blog announcing this: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp-cloud-engineering-certifications/ .

I am proud to say that I helped contribute to the Terraform Certified Associate exam. Check out my badge here: https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/077f51e4-74cd-478a-af4b-ec338dae8559 . I plan to contribute more in the future.

I am also happy to announce that I was a tech reviewer on the first study guide for this cert titled “HashiCorp Terraform Certified Associate Preparation Guide“. You can find it here: https://leanpub.com/terraform-certified/. This guide was authored by fellow Microsoft MVP Ned Bellavance and Microsoft CSA Adin Ermie. Huge thanks guys for letting me be a part of this project!

If you work with Terraform I hope you get certified and be sure to use the study guide!

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Deploy Rancher on Azure for Kubernetes Management

Lately I have been hearing a lot about a solution named Rancher in the Kubernetes space. Rancher is an open source Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Operations and Workload Management solution. You can learn more about Rancher here: https://www.rancher.com.

In short you can use Rancher to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters deployed to Azure, AWS, GCP their managed Kubernetes offerings like GCE, EKS, AKS or even if you rolled your own. Rancher also integrates with a bunch of 3rd party solutions for things like authentication such as Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Github, and Ping and logging solutions such as Splunk, Elasticsearch, or a Syslog endpoint.

Recently training opened up for some Rancher/Kubernetes/Docker training so I decided to go. The primary focus was on Rancher while also covering some good info on Docker and Kubernetes. This was really good training with a lot of hands on time, however there was one problem with the labs. The labs had instructions and setup scripts ready to go to run Rancher local on your laptop or on AWS via Terraform. There was nothing for Azure.

I ended up getting my Rancher environment running on Azure but it would have been nice to have some scripts or templates ready to go to spin up Rancher on Azure. I did find some ARM templates to spin up Rancher but they deployed an old version and it was not clear in the templates on where they could be updated to deploy the new version of Rancher. I decided to spend some time building out a couple of ARM templates that can be used to quickly deploy Rancher on Azure and add a Kubernetes host to Rancher. In the ARM template I pulled together it pulls the Rancher container from Docker Hub so it will always deploy the latest version. In this blog post I will spell out the steps to get your Rancher up and running in under 15 minutes.

First off you can find the ARM Templates here on my Github here: https://github.com/Buchatech/DeployRanchertoAzure.

The repository consists of ARM templates for deploying Rancher and a host VM for Kubernetes. NOTE: These templates are intended for labs to learn Rancher. They are not intended for use in production.

In the repo ARM Template #1 named RancherNode.JSON will deploy an Ubuntu VM with Docker and the latest version of Rancher (https://hub.docker.com/r/rancher/rancher) from Docker Hub. ARM Template #2 named RancherHost.JSON will deploy an Ubuntu VM with Docker to be used as a Kubernetes host in Rancher.

Node Deployment

Deploy the RancherNode.JSON ARM template to your Azure subscription through “Template Deployment” or other deployment method. You will be prompted for the following info shown in the screenshot:

Host Deployment

Deploy the RancherHost.JSON ARM template to your Azure subscription through “Template Deployment” or other deployment method. Note that that should deploy this into the same Resource Group that you deployed the Rancher Node ARM template into. You will be prompted for the following info shown in the screenshot:

After the Rancher Node and Rancher Host ARM templates are deployed you should see the following resources in the new Resource Group:

NameType
RancherVNet Virtual network
RancherHost Virtual machine
RancherNode Virtual machine
RancherHostPublicIP Public IP address
RancherNodePublicIP Public IP address
RancherHostNic Network interface
RancherNodeNic Network interface
RancherHost_OSDisk Disk
RancherNode_OSDisk Disk

Next navigate the Rancher portal in the web browser. The URL is the DNS name of the Rancher Node VM. You can find the DNS name by clicking on the Rancher Node VM in the Azure portal on the overview page. Here is an example of the URL:

https://ranchernode.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com

The Rancher portal will prompt you to set a password. This is shown in the following screenshot.

After setting the password the Rancher portal will prompt you for the correct Rancher Server URL. This will automatically be the Rancher Node VM DNS name. Click Save URL.

You will then be logged into the Rancher portal. You will see the cluster page. From here you will want to add a cluster. Doing this is how you add a new Kubernetes cluster to Rancher. In this post I will show you how to add a cluster to the Rancher Host VM. When it’s all said and done Rancher will have successfully deployed Kubernetes to the Rancher Host VM. Note that you could add a managed Kubernetes such as AKS but we won’t do that in this blog. I will save that for a future blog post!

Click on Add Cluster

Under “From my own existing nodes” Click on custom, give the cluster a name and click Next.

Next check all the boxes for the Node Options since all the roles will be on a single Kubernetes cluster. Copy the code shown at the bottom of the page, click done and run the code on the Rancher Host.

In order to run the code on the Rancher Host you need to SSH in and run it from there. To do this follow these steps:

  1. In the Azure Portal, from within the resource group click on the Rancher Host VM.
  2. On the Overview page click on Connect.
  3. Copy “ssh ranchuser@rancherhost.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com” from the Connect to virtual machine pop up screen.
  4. Open a terminal in either Azure cloud shell or with something like a terminal via VS Code and past the “ssh ranchuser@rancherhost.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com” in.

Running the code will look like this:

When done you can run Docker PS to see that the Rancher agent containers are running.

In the Rancher portal under clusters you will see the Rancher host being provisioned

The status will change as Kubernetes is deployed.

Once it’s done provisioning you will see your Kubernetes cluster as Active.

From here you can see a bunch of info about your new Kubernetes cluster. Also notice that you could even launch Kubectl right from hereand start running commands! Take some time to click around to see all the familiar stuff you are used to working with in Kubernetes. This is pretty cool and simplifies the management experience for Kubernetes. 

If you want to add more nodes or need the configuration code again just click the ellipsis button and edit.

In Edit Cluster you can change the cluster name, get and change settings and copy the code to add more VMs to the cluster.

That’s the end of this post. Thanks for reading. Check back for more Azure, Kubernetes, and Rancher blog posts.

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