Co-hosting 2 sessions in the Azure Hybrid Cloud Study Hall Series

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 sessions are:

Introduction to Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes

on May 5, 2022 10:00AM – 11:30AM (Pacific) co-hosting with Pierre Roman. 

Add to Calendar:
https://aka.ms/learnlive-azure-hybrid-cloud-study-hall-Ep7

The Learn Module:
https://aka.ms/learnlive-20220505A

Implement Azure App Service on Kubernetes with Arc

on June 9, 2022 10:00AM – 11:30AM (Pacific) co-hosting with Lior Kamrat.

Add to Calendar:
https://aka.ms/learnlive-azure-hybrid-cloud-study-hall-Ep11

The Learn Module:
https://aka.ms/learnlive-20220609A

Check out all of the Learn Live – Azure Hybrid Cloud Study Hall sessions here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/events/learntv/learnlive-azure-hybrid-cloud-study-hall

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Speaking at MMS 2022 in Person!

MMSMOA is back in person for 2022. I am excited to be heading back to present a session and be on some panels!

Here is the MMS website: https://mmsmoa.com

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

Session link to register here: mms2022atmoa.sched.com/event/yDOu/azure-arc-extending-hyperscale-cloud-management-to-your-datacenter

I will also be a part of these panels:

Cloud Adoption Roundtable

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
  • Common mistakes/pitfalls
  • Q&A with cloud adoption survivors

https://mms2022atmoa.sched.com/event/102rB/cloud-adoption-roundtable

Cloud AMA – Come ask the Cloud MVPs Anything

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.

https://mms2022atmoa.sched.com/event/zp1h/cloud-ama-come-ask-the-cloud-mvps-anything

Hope to see you at MMS 2022!

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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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“Azure Arc enabled Servers” Course on Pluralsight

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.

Check out the course here: https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/azure-arc-enabled-servers-getted-started

This is my 2nd course in the 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 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.

Here is a link to check out the new Azure Arc path: https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skills/managing-environments-with-azure-arc

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! 

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow mehttps://app.pluralsight.com/profile/author/steve-buchanan

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Speaking at Inside Azure Management Summit

I was recently added to the speaker lineup for the “Inside  Azure Management Summit” happening on 7/23/2020. This event is a FREE 1-day virtual event. It features the Microsoft cloud experts from the authoring team of “Inside Azure Management” book, Microsoft MVP’s, and community experts from around the world.

Attendees will get a day full of deep-dive technical sessions across a variety of Microsoft cloud topics including:

  • DevOps and Automation
  • Cyber Security
  • Cloud Governance
  • Migration and Monitoring
  • Docker and Kubernetes
  • AI and Identity

The sessions will span a 13-hr period to allow audiences from around the world to join a portion of the event.

 I will be giving a session on Azure Policy. Here is my session info:

Session Title:

Azure Policy Insights & Multi-Tag demo via Azure Policy

 

Session Abstract:

Azure Policy is a great tool when it comes to auditing and ensuring your cloud governance is met. In this session 9 time Microsoft Azure MVP Steve Buchanan is going to take you on a full-speed ride on the ins and outs of Azure Policy and land you with a recipe for handling a multi-tagging strategy with Azure Policy. Some of the key topics you will learn from this session include:

  • Overview of Azure Policy
  • Azure Policy Use Cases
  • How Azure Policy can meet NIST standards
  • Azure Policy vs RBAC
  • Overview of Azure Policy Guest Configuration
  • Tagging and more

Here is the direct link to my session:

https://insideazuremgmt.com/session/azure-policy-insights-multi-tag-demo-via-azure-policy/

Be sure to register for this event to check out all the great sessions including mine on Azure Policy.

Here is the link to the official site:

https://www.insideazuremgmt.com

Here is the link to register:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/inside-azure-management-the-virtual-summit-tickets-109230577598?aff=ebdssbeac

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Application Gateway Ingress Controller Deployment Script

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.

You can download the script here: https://github.com/Buchatech/Application-Gateway-Ingress-Controller-Deployment-Script

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.
Application Gateway Ingress Controller Architecture

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.

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: myapp
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: azure/application-gateway
spec:
  rules:
  - http:
      paths:
      - path: /
        backend:
          serviceName: myapp
          servicePort: 8080

Thanks for reading and check back soon for more blogs on AKS and Azure.

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Cloud Governance, Bringing Order To Your Cloud Chaos – Podcast

Recently I was a guest on the “Day Two Cloud” podcast hosted by fellow Microsoft MVP/Pluralsight author Ned Bellavance.

We talked about how native Azure governance & management tools Azure Policy, Tagging, and Blueprints can be used to bring order to your cloud environments. Listen now here:

Check it out here:

https://packetpushers.net/podcast/day-two-cloud-033-cloud-governance-bringing-order-to-your-cloud-chaos

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Azure DevOps & Teams Integration = perfect match

 Recently Microsoft announced they have 13 million daily users in Teams outpacing Slack. You can read about this announcement here:  https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/11/20689143/microsoft-teams-active-daily-users-stats-slack-competition. There are many reasons Microsoft Teams has seen tremendous growth since its launch. I use Teams daily across all of my projects. In this post, I am going to write about one that has been exciting and useful for me. In this post, I am going to explore the integration with Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps.

Are you working on Azure? If so, you are probably working with ARM Templates for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Azure DevOps can help you centralize DevOps teams IaC ARM Templates. In addition, you will want to use VS Code and Microsoft Teams. There are many extensions in VS Code for ARM Templates. With Teams, you can integrate with Azure DevOps to track commits, pull requests, and even 2-way integration with Kanban boards.

Within Microsoft Teams you can add what is called “Apps”. These Apps are how you extend Teams and or integrate with other systems. This is how you integrate with Azure DevOps. Before we dive into this there are two important prereqs to note.

#1 You can only integrate a Teams channel with Azure DevOps when they both exist in the same Azure Active Directory tenant organization.

#2 Your Teams needs to be a part of an Office 365 account. The free version of Teams does have an Azure Pipelines app but does not have the Azure DevOps app that gives you full 2-way integration. The Azure Pipelines app is for notifications while the Azure DevOps app is for full collaboration.

Here are the high-level steps to integrate a Teams channel with the Azure DevOps App.

In your Teams channel go to Manage Team and then click on Apps.

Click on More Apps.

Search for Azure DevOps and click on it.

Input your Teams channel in the field next to Add to a team and then click on Install. This will load the Azure DevOps app into your teams’ channel. Note this needs to be done for each teams’ channel if you want this integration across multiple channels.

Next click the Set up button next to the feature you want to configure and use. The following screenshot shows the 3 features available. 

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Presenting on Azure Stack and Native Azure Management in June/July 2019

It has been a while since presenting on Azure Stack. On June 26th I will be presenting on “Azure Stack 101 in 45 minutes” at an Azure Virtual Day Camp for a D365 user group. Here is a link to the main site:

https://www.d365ug.com/participate/azure-virtual-day

Here is a direct link to my session:

https://azurevirtualdaycamp2019.sched.com/event/PTQE/azure-stack-101-in-45-minutes?iframe=no&w=100%&sidebar=yes&bg=no

In July I will be co-presenting with Kyle Weeks at the Minnesota Azure User Group on Azure Management. The session is titled “Scale Matters: Policy + Azure Management Groups”. Come check out this session if you want to go through what Azure Management Groups are, how they scale to any complexity and the best part… how to do this with policy configurations + Azure blueprints + RBAC. Here is a link to register for the meeting:

https://www.meetup.com/Minneapolis-Azure-Cloud-Computing-Meetup/events/dtbmtpyzkbgb/

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Speaking at MMS 2019

In a week I will be speaking at MMS 2019! I will be presenting 3 sessions and co-hosting 2 panels. If you are attending MMS check out my sessions and the panels. Here is the rundown:

Sessions:

Monday, May 6 • 1:00pm – 2:45pm
Deploying Infrastructure as Code with Azure and Terraform – With fellow Microsoft MVP Ned Bellavance
https://sched.co/N6cC

Tuesday, May 7 • 8:00am – 9:45am
Improving your on-prem and cloud security with Azure Security Center – With fellow Microsoft MVP Ned Bellavance
https://sched.co/N6c9

Thursday, May 9 • 1:00pm – 2:45pm
Mastering Azure with Visual Studio Code – With fellow Microsoft MVP Peter De Tender.
https://sched.co/N6d4

Panels:

Tuesday, May 7 • 3:00pm – 4:45pm
Azure Governance and Management Panel
https://sched.co/N6gD

This panel includes an all-star group from Microsoft including:

Tim Benjamin
Principal Group PM Manager, Microsoft

Michael Greene
Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Jim Britt
Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

and

Eamon O’Reilly
Principal Program Manager, Microsoft

Thursday, May 9 • 3:00pm – 4:45pm
Azure Stack Panel Discussion – (400)
https://sched.co/N6hE

This panel consists of a bunch of Microsoft MVP rockstars and Microsoft staff including:

Ned Bellavance
Founder / Microsoft MVP, Ned in the Cloud LLC

Thomas Maurer
Senior Cloud Advocate, Microsoft

Kristopher Turner
Sr. Cloud Architect/Microsoft MVP, NTT Data Services

Bert Wolters
Principal Consultant, Class-IT

Here is the MMS website:
https://mmsmoa.com

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