G’day folks. I recently had the pleasure of presenting a livestream session via Microsoft Reactor Sydney on a subject close to my heart. It was a great opportunity to share my experience in the subject domain of Security Governance and Azure Policy as Code workflows using Bicep language. And also a good opportunity to receive some questions and feedback in real time from an audience. I’ve included some links below if you’re interested to dive into this subject a bit more. Watch Watch the recorded session from Microsoft Reactor’s livestream event. YouTube: Flexing Your Security Governance wit ..read more

Coming Soon to a browser near you! Hey there, I’m super excited to participate in this year’s Festive Tech Calendar event. Time and real-life events have not been my friendliest allies towards my writing efforts of late. So instead of publishing my blog post “Safeguard Your Festive Holiday with Azure Governance” before it’s ‘done’ I’m working hard behind the scenes to ensure it meets expectations and quality standards. I’ll be updating this blog post and sending out a tweet/linkedin post when we’re cooking with gas again. Cheers, Jesse See all the Festive Tech Calendar submissions for 2021 ..read more

Hey folks! I recently featured as a guest on the Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast for episode 109 to talk Azure Policy as Code with hosts Tobias Zimmergren and Jussi Roine. The Ctrl+Alt+Azure podcast was launched back in October 2019 by Microsoft Azure MVPs Tobias Zimmergren and Jussi Roine. Tobias had reached out to me over twitter to check my availability and interest in contributing to an upcoming episode dedicated to Azure Policy as Code. Admittedly I was surprised by Tobias’s message, and other community events were already on my calendar, but the fact of the matter is that having actively advoca ..read more

Hey folks in this blog post I’m going to share with you how to win the battle versus Azure Policy non-compliance. I had a scope requirement for a recent customer engagement to implement diagnostic settings for several resource types - one of which was Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters. These diagnostic settings needed to be customised per the design document and ultimately logs were to be forwarded to a log analytics workspace – perfect fit for leveraging policy-as-code and deployIfNotExists policies! The following builtin policy seemed to fit my requirements above perfectly so I set abo ..read more

The recent inaugural HashiTalks Australia & New Zealand event was an incredible opportunity to present a 30min session on how combining Terraform with CSVs and ForEach we can deploy at scale from large datasets and achieve a Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) methodology. Firstly, here’s what you can expect from this article: further context not captured by the recorded session insights into pros and cons (very important to know these before diving in) another usage pattern for your Terraform infrastructure-as-code journey You can find my HashiTalk video link/slides at the end of this post Fu ..read more

Global Azure is a community event about the Microsoft Azure platform. On April 15-17 the Global Azure community goes online to share, learn, and have community Azure fun together. This year (2021) I was fortunate to have a session accepted for Global Azure 2021 titled: Policy as Code with Bicep for Enterprise Scale Recently I’ve been diving into Microsoft’s new DSL Bicep and as I’m passionate about Azure Policy I thought why not combine both aspects into a session? Admittedly, I left my sessionize submission very late and probably just scraped in. Even so it was a wonderful surprise to see ..read more

Azure Spring Clean is an annual global community-driven event founded/run by Joe Carlyle and Thomas Thornton with the aim of promoting well managed Azure tenants. Over 5 days in March expert-level content from contributors around the globe will be shared via AzureSpringClean.com. Today I’m excited to share with you patterns for leveraging DeployIfNotExists (DINE) policies to automate your Azure Monitoring Governance with Azure Monitor Metric Alerts. This blog post aims to give you a general overview of what you need to know with splashings of advanced technical details from the field. Executi ..read more

Hey everyone. I’ve recently passed the AZ-400 exam for Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer Expert after about a month of solid study and wanted to share my experience to help others achieve a pass. In this blog I’ll cover a concept called Just Enough Study and demonstrate a method to hunt Key Phrases with Azure Text Analytics. Both methods have helped me achieve exam passes on many occasions over the years. Candidates for this exam should have subject matter expertise working with people, processes, and technologies to continuously deliver business value. Responsibilities for this role inclu ..read more

After such a memorable 2020 year (for both good & bad reasons) I’ve been itching to publish my retrospective. I’ve split this retro into two parts ‘pre COVID-19’ and ‘during COVID-19’ to assist with my recollection of events. Yay. So what the heck happened in 2020? Pre COVID-19 (Jan to Mar 2020) Witnessed the Black Summer Blogged about Zero-Touch BitLocker with PowerShell which amazingly sat in draft for 2 years Started blogging about tech on https://blog.kloud.com.au/ Played left-back in an AAM team for CHUFC Attended Microsoft OpenHack on Containers and blogged about it Missed out on Mi ..read more

This is Part 3 of the Ansible on Azure series. In this blog you’ll discover Ansible role development patterns on Azure using the Molecule-Azure driver through methodologies you can follow and YAML examples. During my own discovery and testing solution examples of the Molecule-Azure driver were scarce to find so I’m hoping to aggregate my learnings in this blog. Part 1 covers the birds-eye solution overview and introduces you to key components. Part 2 showcases the Terraform module used to automate deployment of an Ansible control host into Azure. Part 3 dives into using the Molecule-Azure dri ..read more