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!
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:
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.
Today my 11th course on Pluralsight was published! This course is “Azure Arc Enabled Servers: Getting Started“. In this course, Azure Arc-enabled Servers: Getting Started, you’ll learn how to manage external servers with Azure Arc.
Managing Windows and Linux servers across on-premises and multiple clouds can be disjointed and overly complicated. Many organizations today are choosing to adopt a multi-cloud strategy driving the boom in having servers across many clouds. After viewing this course, you’ll have knowledge of Azure Arc enabled Servers and how to use it to manage Windows and Linux servers across on-premises and multiple clouds.
This is my 2nd course in the Azure Arc pathtitled “Managing Environments with Azure Arc” on Pluralsight. There are other courses in the path already such as Azure Arc: The Big Picture, Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes: Getting Started (by me), Azure Arc-enabled Data Services: The Big Picture, and Azure Arc & Azure Lighthouse: First Look, and many more Azure Arc courses on the way.
I hope you find value in this new Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes: Getting Started course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses including my second Azure Arc related course!
On 10/26/21 I will be presenting at the BDPA Twin Cities & Daugherty’s sixth Tech Talk! In this talk, I will give an overview of Microsoft’s Cloud taking you beyond knowing how to spell Azure. LOL
In this session, I am going to dive into the many facets and services Azure has to offer spanning from dev, infrastructure, DevOps, data, & more. We are also going to explore what it takes to start a career in Cloud and what the areas of growth in the Cloud are.
The session is Tuesday, October 26, 2021at 5:30 – 7:00 PM (CST).
On September 30th I will be speaking at the Jamaica Azure User Group giving an intro to GitOps and AKS!
Here is a breakdown of what I will be covering in this session:
CI/CD with Kubernetes on top of management of Kubernetes configuration management can be complex and intimidating. Application definitions, configurations, management, and continuous delivery for Kubernetes can be simplified, automated, and declarative. This can be achieved via GitOps.
Microsoft simplifies running Kubernetes with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) but it can still be complex when it comes to the management you are responsible for and application deployment.
In this session we will take a look at:
-An intro into AKS -An intro into GitOps -How you can utilize GitOps and git-based techniques with AKS to drive easier application deployment -How to use GitOps for configuration management of Kubernetes from your source control system
I was recently a guest on Microsoft’s Azure Arc Jumpstart Lighting show. In the episode of Jumpstart Lightning, I shared with Lior my thoughts around Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes, industry trends, GitOps, and my new Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes Getting Started course on Pluralsight.
Today Pluralsight published 1 of 2 Azure Arc courses I am building. This marks my 10th course on Pluralsight! This first course is Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes: Getting Started. Azure Arc is a key service in the Azure story extending Azure to the on-premises data center and or multiple clouds outside of Azure.
This course is just under 2 hours and packed full of information & demos to help you get started with the topic. I go into a deeper understanding of the multi-cloud market, Kubernetes in the enterprise, and Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes. Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes architecture. Setting up and using Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes. And using GitOps with Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes.
I am excited about releasing this course for several reasons: #1 Azure Arc is a newer technology from Microsoft and I am happy to share my knowledge about it, #2 This one is a combination of Azure Arc, Kubernetes, & GitOps all technologies I have been working with regularly, #3 Azure is growing, Kubernetes is growing, and multi-cloud is growing all in the enterprise and this course covers all three of these.
Here is the description of the course:
Managing Kubernetes clusters across on-premises and multiple clouds can be disjointed and overly complicated. In this course, Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes: Getting Started, you’ll learn to how to manage external Kubernetes clusters with Azure Arc. First, you’ll explore what Azure Arc k8s is and how to use it. Next, you’ll discover the features of Azure Arc K8s and how to use them. Finally, you’ll learn how to how to use Azure Arc K8s and GitOps to deploy applications. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes needed to manage Kubernetes clusters across on-premises and multiple clouds.
Here are the areas and topics of the course:
Understanding Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes
Intro and Topics
Understanding Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes
Understanding Azure Arc Enabled Kubernetes Use Cases
This course is also a part of the all new Azure Arc path titled “Managing Environments with Azure Arc” on Pluralsight. There are other courses in the path already such as Azure Arc: The Big Picture, Azure Arc-enabled Data Services: The Big Picture, and Azure Arc and Azure Lighthouse: First Look and many more Azure Arc courses on the way.
I hope you find value in this new Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes: Getting Started course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses including my second Azure Arc related course!
I was recently a guest on New Relic‘s Developer Relations team podcast “Observy McObservface” with Jonan Scheffler.
Jonan Scheffler and I talk about Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Linux on Azure, how Microsoft’s been successful at working in enterprise and open source, where I believe GitOps & Kubernetes is eventually going to go, and my excitement in regards to AI and blockchain as well as how they’re going to impact the world. You can listen to the podcast and read the article links below.
