Skip to content
adatum
  •  SCOM Web API
  • About adatum
Community

Speaking at Nordic Virtual Summit

  • 17/01/202114/01/2021
  • by Martin Ehrnst

Nordic Virtual Summit is a free, community-based, virtual event focusing on everything Microsoft Cloud. With more than 40 speakers delivering content on Security and Compliance, Azure and Automation, and Endpoint Management. I am sure this will be one great event whether you work with infrastructure and/or client management.

Register now – it’s free!

2 Days of Quality Content – 100% Virtual – Community-Driven – World Class Speakers – Microsoft MVPs

Event-based automation for Operations

I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at Nordic Virtual Summit. On Wednesday, 02/10 I have a session on how you as an IT Pro can use Azure to perform automated tasks based on events. Being able to adopt some principals from the developer world to better handle operational tasks is a very good idea. And I will show you how.

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
Azure Lighthouse

Webinar: Multi-tenant resource management at scale with Azure Lighthouse

  • 14/01/202112/01/2021
  • by Martin Ehrnst

I have been invited to Azure Management talk. A webinar series focusing on the management space around Azure.

Featuring Azure MVPs and community champions, this webinar series will reveal their top Azure Management tips and tricks, replete with examples from the field. 

Azure Lighthouse

Azure management talk is a five-part webinar series, where I will be showing how you can use Azure Lighthouse to manage resources in Azure cross the tenant barrier.

With Azure Lighthouse, managed service providers and enterprises can manage Azure resources across tenants. This allows MSPs to create their own managing solutions, protecting their IP, as well as eliminating tenant switching. Enterprises with multiple tenants can benefit from the same service and manage their entire infrastructure from one single pane.

Please register for the Azure Lighthouse webinar here

Azure Management talk webinars

Apart from Azure Lighthouse, there are four other webinars scheduled.

5 easy steps to apply financial management to your cloud budget – Thursday 4th February 

Struggling with Azure costs? How can you make your cloud consumption predictable? Tony Nguyen and MVP Cameron Fuller will show how the same ideas which apply to personal financial management also apply to handling your cloud consumption. They will show how these principles have been successfully used for hundreds of companies across the IT landscape. When you leave this session, you will have learned the 5 steps to managing your Azure budget on any scale.

Azure Resource Graph Zero to Hero – Thursday 18th February

In this session, Cloud and Datacenter MVP Billy York will go over the basics of Azure Resource Graph, including how Kusto Query Language (KQL) is used and its limitations in Resource Graph. We’ll then dive into some real-world examples of how you can use Azure Resource Graph with KQL.

Application Observability in a Distributed World – Thursday 25th February

In this session, Chris Reddington will provide an overview of Application Insights and how it slots into the wider Azure Monitoring ecosystem. We will explore Alerts, Metrics, Queries, Dashboards, Workbooks and more, and how Application Insights can bring clarity to a distributed cloud deployment.

8 easy steps to improve your security posture in Azure – Thursday 4th March

You’ve deployed your application on Azure. Instantly hackers are targeting your public IP and the brute forcing of passwords and ports starts. What now? Should I deploy Azure Sentinel, or just enable Azure Security Center as a start? Join MVP and Microsoft RD Maarten Goet as he takes you through the 8 easy steps into improving your security posture on Azure. This is a demo heavy session no cloud engineer or developer should miss!

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
Community

Judging Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge

  • 12/01/202112/01/2021
  • by Martin Ehrnst

I’m attending the Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge (ACDC) as a judge! This is the first time I am participating in this hackathon which has been running for 10 years.

About Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge

ACDC is a 3 day Norwegian hackathon focusing on Microsoft technology, such as Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, IOT. Azure, ML, Power BI.
Our goal is to push technology to new limits while we learn from each other and socialize. This great event has been hosted for over 10 years at the beautiful Voksenåsen. This year we are forced to think new, so we are going online, and going LIVE!

I am very happy that I can contribute to this great event as a judge. Despite the pandemic challenges, I am very sure the event will be a success

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
laptop computer showing c application Infrastructure As Code

Azure Infrastructure as code – Pulumi

  • 10/12/202010/12/2020
  • by Martin Ehrnst

Infrastructure As Code is here to stay. And all companies work with this in a variety of ways. Recently I changed job, and with that comes new challenges. The team I joined I highly skilled and is responsible for a very complex, and large infrastructure in Azure. A great part of this infrastructure is deployed and maintained using a tool called Pulumi.

My new role does not require me to become a developer creating Apps. But I have been advocating and teaching fellow IT pro’s the importance of embracing developer tools and processes for our infrastructure management tasks. My knowledge around infrastructure as code is with PowerShell, Terraform, and ARM. My C# skills are very limited, although I have some experience.
Pulumi is definitely putting developers first, and I need to step up my game.

What is Pulumi

Azure Resource Manager and Azure Bicep are both domain-specific languages, meaning they only work with Azure. Terraform, is another popular tool (almost a standard), which also has it’s own language (HCL). HCL differs from ARM as it works with more than Azure.

Create, deploy, and manage infrastructure on any cloud using familiar programming languages and tools.

Pulumi

Pulumi on the other hand, use general-purpose programming languages. This means you can deploy and maintain your infrastructure with ‘real programming languages’, like C#, Java, TypeScript, and Go.

How does Pulumi work

Pulumi is a declarative infrastructure as code tool. And it’s core engine will ‘build’ your desired infrastructure, and keep track of its state.

Projects and stacks

You start with something called a Project. The project folder is controlled via a Pulumi.yml file looking something like this, where name and runtime are mandatory.

name: core-infra
runtime: dotnet
description: my very first pulumi project

After creating the project you will need to create a stack. The stack is an instance of your project. For example, staging and production of project core-infra would be two separate stacks.

State management

You might be familiar with this concept already, but if not here’s what’s what;
Pulumi keeps a snapshot of your infrastructure, referred to as ‘state’. This allows Pulumi to delete, create, and change your infrastructure components. But it also means you have to think about where you perform edits (only within the Pulumi stack/project), and where to store your state files.

By default Pulumi will store and manage state with their online service, Pulumi Console.

Getting started with Pulumi for Azure

My short goal for self learning Pulumi is to replicate what I demoed in me and Marcel Zehner’s Live streams on Azure resource manager and infrastructure as code.
for Pulumi I am using this repository

For some reason, I assume you run Windows and CSharp, but if you fancy any of the other options, they are documented as well.

To run Pulumi on Azure you will need to install Pulumi, log in/sign up, install .NET 3.1, and Azure CLI (if you don’t have it already). The process is documented on the getting started page.
I tried to run with .NET 5.0, without any luck, but that might be solved soon.

Your next task is to create your project. In all essence, you run a few commands against an empty folder. This will generate the Pulumi program files and your project metadata files. Below is my configuration

cd C:users\MartinEhrnst\repos\Pulumi\
mkdir 1.ResourceGroup-storageAccount
cd 1.ResourceGroup-storageAccount
pulumi new azure-csharp

After filling in your mandatory project parameters, a getting started code will be generated for you. This will create an Azure resource group and a storage account.
In the above picture, I have changed this slightly to include a storage container, and change some of the default parameters. You can find my latest Pulumi code in this GitHub repo

For those experienced with C#, you can see that Pulumi has classes for the Azure resources. But since this is C#, we can use common coding techniques, like iterations (for-each) to deploy our infrastructure.

Pulumi deployments

If I now want to deploy my infrastructure. I will need to run Pulumi, which translates this code into something Azure Resource Manager can understand. To my knowledge, Pulumi uses the Azure Resource Manager REST APIs to run the deployment.

To deploy the resources, you can follow this guide. In my environment above, this is the code and output from my review.

PS C:\Users\MartinEhrnst\repos\Pulumi\1.ResourceGroup-storageAccount> pulumi up
Previewing update (dev)

View Live:

     Type                         Name                Plan
 +   pulumi:pulumi:Stack          rg-and-storage-dev  create
 +   ├─ azure:core:ResourceGroup  resourceGroup       create
 +   ├─ azure:storage:Account     storage             create
 +   └─ azure:storage:Container   container           create
 
Resources:
    + 4 to create

Do you want to perform this update? details
+ pulumi:pulumi:Stack: (create)
    [urn=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::pulumi:pulumi:Stack::rg-and-storage-dev]
    + azure:core/resourceGroup:ResourceGroup: (create)
        [urn=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::azure:core/resourceGroup:ResourceGroup::resourceGroup]
        [provider=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::pulumi:providers:azure::default_3_33_2::04da6b54-80e4-46f7-96ec-]
        location  : "norwayeast"
        name      : "rg-PulumiStorage"
    + azure:storage/account:Account: (create)
        [urn=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::azure:storage/account:Account::storage]
        [provider=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::pulumi:providers:azure::default_3_33_2::04da6b54-80e4-46f7-96ec-b56ff0331ba9]
        accountKind           : "StorageV2"
        accountReplicationType: "LRS"
        accountTier           : "Standard"
        allowBlobPublicAccess : false
        enableHttpsTrafficOnly: true
        isHnsEnabled          : false
        location              : output<string>
        minTlsVersion         : "TLS1_0"
        name                  : "storage2966fa9"
        resourceGroupName     : "rg-PulumiStorage"
    + azure:storage/container:Container: (create)
        [urn=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::azure:storage/container:Container::container]
        [provider=urn:pulumi:dev::rg-and-storage::pulumi:providers:azure::default_3_33_2::04da6b54-80e4-46f7-96ec-b56ff0331ba9]
        containerAccessType: "private"
        name               : "images"
        storageAccountName : "storageab46f04"

In Azure, I can now see that the storage account and resource group are created. But I cannot find this as deployments. I suspect this has to do with how Pulumi interacts with Azure resource manager. This might not be an issue for you, but if you rely on the deployment plane, you should have given this a thought.

Should you use Pulumi for Azure?

Given my very limited knowledge of the product that is hard for me to answer. But there are things you should consider.
As I said, I have advocated for a few years about the ‘Modern IT pro’. Meaning we need to adopt and use more developer-oriented software and processes, like Git for example.

By using Pulumi you are not only adopting processes, but you also assume your team knows CSharp or any of the other supported languages. If your team consists of IT Pro’s who are beginning to explore the Dev side of the DevOps circle. Pulumi will give you some rough weeks ahead.

On the other hand, if your team is developer heavy, looking into the operations side. Pulumi might be your best choice. As a developer, it must seem alluring to be able to provision infrastructure together with your application code.
However, the responsibility for correct configuration, governance, and security is still the most important for your infrastructure. Can this be done with the same team and codebase, you can definitely consider using Pulumi.

Pulumi ARM template converter

A tool to convert ARM templates to Pulumi already exists. During my initial testing, I had success converting less complex templates, but when I tried to convert a nested template with a Copy loop the tool failed.

I suggest you try it out with your own templates, and since it’s open-sourced, you could always try to improve it your self. If not, the community will at some point.

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
gray laptop computer showing html codes in shallow focus photography Azure

Azure Infrastructure As Code video series

  • 28/10/202028/10/2020
  • by Martin Ehrnst

For weeks Marcel Zehner and I have held four live streams. Covering ‘everything’ related to Infrastructure as code on Azure.

Recording available

In the series, we covered the following topics, and everything is now available on YouTube

  • Advanced ARM templates
  • Deployment scripts
  • Linked and nested ARM templates
  • ARM template deployment with Pipelines

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Posts navigation

1 2 3 … 19

Top Posts & Pages

  • Azure AD authentication in Azure Functions
  • Multiple Azure credentials in PowerShell
  • Working with Azure Monitor Rest API
  • Using Azure pipelines to deploy ARM templates
  • HealthServiceStore.edb file growth
  • Multi subscription deployment with DevOps and Azure Lighthouse
  • Access to Blob storage using Managed Identity in Logic Apps - by Nadeem Ahamed
  • Remediate Azure Policy with PowerShell
  • From one platform to another
  • SCOM Virtualization host CPU spikes

Tags

agent announcements api ARM authoring Automation Azure AzureAD AzureFunctions AzureLighthouse AzureMonitor AzureSpringClean Bicep Community CSP database EventGrid ExpertsLive ExpertsLiveEU IaC Infrastructure as code Integrations LogAnalytics management pack monitoring MSIgnite MSIgnite2017 MSOMS MSP nicconf Nordic Virtual Summit OperationsManager OpsMgr Powershell QUickPublish rest SCDPM SCOM SCOM2016 SCVMM Serverless SquaredUP SysCtr system center Webasto

Follow Martin Ehrnst

  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

Microsoft Azure MVP

Martin Ehrnst Microsoft Azure MVP

NiCE Active 365 Monitor for Azure

NiCE active 365 monitor for Azure
Adatum.no use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Cookie Policy
Theme by Colorlib Powered by WordPress
adatum
Proudly powered by WordPress Theme: Shapely.