Today I will be speaking at the Omaha Azure User Group. I will be speaking on Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and GitOps.
I am really looking forward to this user group meeting! I will be speaking on & showing real-time the power of using Microsoft Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and GitOps, deploying a Container app to a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). More info on my session:
Session title: Push Code, Not Containers with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes and GitOps
Session details: Use Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes to manage Kubernetes clusters across Google Cloud Platform and Azure without running a single Kubectl command! In this session, Steve Buchanan will take you into the world of GitOps. He will show you how to deploy applications and configuration to GKE clusters and AKS clusters from a GitHub repository. Explore how we can use this new operating model for Kubernetes and cloud-native apps to declaratively describe and ensure the state of our applications and Kubernetes environments.
Thanks to AzureCrazy.com for featuring me in an interview.
In the article we discussed being a Microsoft MVP, getting certified in Azure, the positive impact PowerShell can have on ones IT Career, getting started with Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Stack Hub & more. Check it out here:
I am excited to announce that I am one of the experts in several Ask the Expert sessions during Microsoft Ignite 2020 this week.
I will be a part of a variety of sessions with topics ranging from Linux and PowerShell on Azure, Kubernetes on Azure, Azure Migration, and Transforming Windows Server workloads in Azure.
Here is the link to the Ignite home page myignite.microsoft.com. I hope to see you on the digital Ignite event and in one of the Ask the Expert Sessions!
Update 9/30/2020
Being a part of several Ask the Expert sessions was really fun! My most memorable session was the Ask the Expert: Linux and PowerShell on Azure session.
This session was packed full of superstars from Microsoft product groups and fellow MVPs including; Jeffery Snover, Jason Helmick, Janaka Rangama, and Alexander Nikolić. Here is a screenshot from the session:
After the session, I tweeted about the session and shared some wisdom about PowerShell, and both Jeffery Snover and Jason Helmick retweet my tweet!
2020 is not all bad. It’s pretty cool when the inventor of PowerShell and the PowerShell Program Manager retweet you!
Today I went on “Tech Talk Wednesday” a podcast and radio show with Kazeem Adegboyega The topic was “30 Minutes of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)“. It streamed online via Microsoft Teams and aired in Lagos, Nigeria on Lagos State University (LASU) radio (95.7).
I had a great time talking with Kazeem! Even Sam Erskine made a guest appearance. If you missed the live show you can watch it on YouTube:
I am honored to be a guest next Wednesday, August 26th on the “Tech Talk Wednesday” podcast and radio show with Kazeem Adegboyega (@KazeemCanTeach)! We will be chatting about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
This show will be streamed online via Microsoft Teams and will air in Lagos, Nigeria on Lagos State University (LASU) radio (95.7)!
One of my goals is to help spread knowledge about tech in Africa and showcase African technologists in the US. This is the first step in that journey.
Microsoft has been making some amazing enhancements to AKS and in the open-source space in general. This effort has been making it easier to use Kubernetes and easier for folks who are getting started with Kubernetes.
Recently Microsoft has added more functionally called “Kubernetes resource view“.
This allows you to see and work with some Kubernetes resources directly in the Azure portal. As you can see in the previous screenshot it includes Namespaces, Workloads, and Services. When you deploy a new AKS cluster this is enabled by default.
If you have deployed an AKS cluster before this functionality was release you will need to enable the Kubernetes resource view. You can choose what namespace to enable this on. It will look like this:
The three main areas of resources are:
Namespaces
Workloads
Deployments
Pods
Replica Sets
Daemon sets
Services and ingresses
In these resource areas, you can view the resources, add, delete, and show labels.
You can click on a resource to see the properties of it under Overview. The overview tab has valuable information for example for a pod you can see the pod status, the containers that belong to it, its conditions, and more. Here are some screenshots:
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You can see any events around the resource and you can even view or edit the resources Yaml. Here is what it looks like when editing a resource:
Well, this was a quick blog post to give an early look at the new Kubernetes resource view in AKS. I recommend you check out it! Remember this is a preview and it’s going to get better and better.
I can imagine in the future we will be able to access more Kubernetes resources and API Objects in the Azure portal. For example, it will be cool to be able to work with Secrets, and Configmaps right in the Azure portal! I don’t know about you, but I am very excited about what Microsoft has been doing with AKS!
I recently had the honor of being a guest on the “Lisa at the Edge” Podcast. Lisa is a Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Strategist and an influencer in the hybrid cloud community based out of Scotland. She runs a blog and this year she started a popular podcast.
On Lisa’s podcast, she covers Careers in Tech and Microsoft Hybrid Cloud and a range of other topics with experts across the tech community.
This is an episode you don’t want to miss. This was one of the most entertaining podcasts I have been on. It took some interesting turns in regards to topics and very engaging. In the podcast episode Lisa and I talk about:
Evolving your career as technology evolves
Transformation of IT dept to Strategic Business Partner
When working with
Containers a common need is to store Container images somewhere. Container
Registries are the go-to for this. Docker hub is an example of a Container
Registry and it is the most well-known Container Registry.
What is a Container Registry?
A Container Registry is a group of repositories used to store container images. A container repository is used to manage, pull or push container images. A Container Registry does more than a repository in that it has API paths, tasks, scanning for vulnerabilities, digital signature of images, access control rules and more.
Container registries can be public or private. For example, a public registry is Docker Hub and anyone can access its container repositories to pull images. A private registry is one that you would host either on-premises or on a cloud provider. All of the major cloud providers including Azure has a Container Registry offering.
Integrate ACR with AKS
With AKS it is a good idea to use a private container registry to host your container images. The process is used Docker to build your image>push the image to your Azure Container Registry>Pull the image from the registry when deploying a Pod to your AKS cluster.
There are 3 ways to
integrate AKS with Azure Container Registry. I typically only use one way and
will focus on that in this blog post.
2 of the ways you can integrate AKS with Azure Container Registry. The first is through an Azure AD service principal name (SPN) that assigns the AcrPull role to the SPN. More on this here. You would use this first way in scenarios where you only have one ACR and this will be the default place to pull images from.
The second is to create a Kubernetes ServiceAccount that would be used to pull images when deploying pods. With this you would add “kind: ServiceAccount” to your Kubernetes cluster and it would use the ACR credentials. Then in your pods yaml files you would need to specify the service account for example “serviceAccountName: ExampleServiceAccountName”.
The way I like to integrate AKS with Azure Container Registry is to use Kubernetes Secret of type docker-registry. With this option basically, you create a secret in the Kubernetes cluster for your Azure Container Registry. You then specify the secret in your pod yaml files. This allows you to have multiple container registries to pull from. This option is also quick and easy to setup. Ok.
To get started you need to build your Docker image and push it up to your Azure Container Registry. In this blog post, I will not cover deploying ACR, or building the Docker image assuming you have already done these things. Now let’s set up the ACR and AKS integration using a docker-registry Kubernetes secret.
1. For the first step, you will need the credentials to your Azure Container Registry. To get this go navigate to:
2. The second step push your Docker image up to your ACR.
# Log into the Azure Container Registry
docker login ACRNAMEHERE.azurecr.io -u ACRUSERNAMEHERE -p PASSWORDHERE
# Tag the docker image with ACR
docker tag DOCKERIMAGENAMEHERE ACRNAMEHERE.azurecr.io/DOCKERIMAGENAMEHERE:v1
# Push the image to ACR
docker push ACRNAMEHERE.azurecr.io/DOCKERIMAGENAMEHERE:v1
3. The third step create the docker-registry Kubernetes secret by running following syntax from Azure Cloud Shell:
In Kubernetes, you have a container or containers running as a pod. In front of the pods, you have something known as a service. Services are simply an abstraction that defines a logical set of pods and how to access them. As pods move around the service that defines the pods it is bound to keeps track of what nodes the pods are running on. For external access to services, there is typically an Ingress controller that allows access from outside of the Kubernetes cluster to a service. An ingress defines the rules for inbound connections.
Microsoft has had an
Application Gateway Ingress Controller for Azure Kubernetes Service AKS in
public preview for some time and recently released for GA. The Application
Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) monitors the Kubernetes cluster for ingress
resources and makes changes to the specified Application Gateway to allow
inbound connections.
This allows you to leverage the Application Gateway service in Azure as the entry into your AKS cluster. In addition to utilizing the Application Gateway standard set of functionality, the AGIC uses the Application Gateway Web Application Firewall (WAF). In fact, that is the only version of the Application Gateway that is supported by the AGIC. The great thing about this is that you can put Application Gateways WAF protection in front of your applications that are running on AKS.
This blog post is not a detailed deep dive into AGIC. To learn more about AGIC visit this link: https://azure.github.io/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress. In this blog post, I want to share a script I built that deploys the AGIC. There are many steps to deploying the AGIC and I figured this is something folks will need to deploy over and over so it makes sense to make it a little easier to do. You won’t have to worry about creating a managed identity, getting various id’s, downloading and updating YAML files, or installing helm charts. Also, this script will be useful if you are not familiar with sed and helm commands. It combines PowerShell, AZ CLI, sed, and helm code. I have already used this script about 10 times myself to deploy the AGIC and boy has it saved me time. I thought it would be useful to someone out there and wanted to share it.
I typically deploy RBAC enabled AKS clusters so this script is set up to work with an RBAC enabled AKS cluster. If you are deploying AGIC for a non-RBAC AKS cluster be sure to view the notes in the script and adjust a couple of lines of code to make it non-RBAC ready. Also note this AGIC script is focused on brownfield deployments so before running the script there are some components you should already have deployed. These components are:
VNet and 2 Subnets (one for your AKS cluster and one for the App Gateway)
AKS Cluster
Public IP
Application Gateway
The script will
deploy and do the following:
Deploys the AAD Pod Identity.
Creates the Managed Identity used by the AAD Pod Identity.
Gives the Managed Identity Contributor access to Application Gateway.
Gives the Managed Identity Reader access to the resource group that hosts the Application Gateway.
Downloads and renames the sample-helm-config.yaml file to helm-agic-config.yaml.
Updates the helm-agic-config.yaml with environment variables and sets RBAC enabled to true using Sed.
Adds the Application Gateway ingress helm chart repo and updates the repo on your AKS cluster.
Installs the AGIC pod using a helm chart and environment variables in the helm-agic-config.yaml file.
Now let’s take a look at running the script. It is recommended to upload to and run this script from Azure Cloud shell (PowerShell). Run:
./AGICDeployment.ps1 -verbose
You will be prompted
for the following as shown in the screenshot:
Enter the name of the Azure Subscription you want to use.:
Enter the name of the Resource Group that contains the AKS Cluster.:
Enter the name of the AKS Cluster you want to use.:
Enter the name of the new Managed Identity.:
Here is a screenshot
of what you will see while the script runs.
That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else except entering values at the beginning of running the script. To verify your new AGIC pod is running you can check a couple of things. First, run:
kubectl get pods
Note the name of my
AGIC pod is appgw-ingress-azure-6cc9846c47-f7tqn.
Your pod name will be different.
Now you can check
the logs of the AGIC pod by running:
kubectl logs appgw-ingress-azure-6cc9846c47-f7tqn
You should not have
any errors but if you do they will show in the log. If everything ran fine the
output log should look similar to:
After its all said and done you will have a running Application Gateway Ingress Controller that is connected to the Application Gateway and ready for new ingresses.
This script does not deploy any ingress into your AKS cluster. That will need to be done in addition to this script as you need. The following is an example YAML code for an ingress. You can use this to create an ingress for a pod running in your AKS cluster.
These days the growth of Kubernetes is on fire! Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes offering is one of the fastest-growing products in the Azure portfolio of cloud services with no signs of slowing down. For some time me and two fellow Microsoft MVPs Janaka Rangama (@JanakaRangama) and Ned Bellavance (@Ned1313) have been working hard on an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) book. We are excited that the book has been finished and is currently in production. The publisher Apress plans to publish it on December 28th, 2019.
Besides my co-authors, we had additional rock stars to help with this project. For the Tech Review, we had the honor to work with Mike Pfeiffer (@mike_pfeiffer) Microsoft MVP, Author, Speaker, CloudSkills.fm podcast and Keiko Harada (@keikomsft) Senior Program Manager – Azure Compute – Containers. Shout out to them and huge thanks for being a part of this!
We also had the honor of the foreword being written by Brendan Burns (@brendandburns) Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and co-founder of Kubernetes. A shout out to him and a world of thanks for taking the time to help with this project!
In this book, we take a journey inside Docker containers, container registries, Kubernetes architecture, Kubernetes components, and core Kubectl commands. We then dive into topics around Azure Container Registry, Rancher for Kubernetes management, deep dive into AKS, package management with HELM, and using AKS in CI/CD with Azure DevOps. The goal of this book is to give the reader just enough theory and lots of practical straightforward knowledge needed to start running your own AKS cluster.
For anyone looking to work with Azure Kubernetes Service or already working with it, this book is for you! We hope you get a copy and it becomes a great tool you can use on your Kubernetes journey.