I host this blog on Netlify and source control is managed using GitHub. Often, I end up writing few blog posts together, but not necessarily want all of them published together. Jekyll allows to put future date in the post and it will not be published until that date. This lets me write blog posts on same day but end up publishing them later based on the date set for the post. However, this means that when you run jekyll build posts with future dates will be skipped and I will need to run jekyll build again on the post date to publish the blog posts. Same applies to Netlify. Curious how we can ..read more

As your team starts to deploy resources to Kubernetes regularly, it becomes necessary for you as a cluster administrator to maintain good standards and consistency of the Kubernetes resources. Be it, ensuring all the resources have set of labels, or ensuring you only pull images from your enterprise container registry. Gatekeeper is a well known policy enforcement tool using Open Policy Agent (OPA) - which is a opensource, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. But did you know you can validate policies on your Kubernetes manifests before you deploy them on to the cluster? In this p ..read more

GitHub Actions is great in automating your workflows. However, as you start using various actions from GitHub Marketplace in your workflow, it will soon become necessary for you to keep the actions up-to-date. Actions might contain security fixes, bug fixes etc and manually keeping track of updates or updating them when a newer version is available is a lot of hassle. This is where we can use Depndabot can help is by automatically raising PR’s whenever there is a newer version of action is available used in the workflow. In this post, we will see quick way to keep the actions up-to-date using ..read more

Cosmos DB Emulator is great for developing against Azure Cosmos DB in your local environment. If you want to run the emulator on Mac/Linux though, the emulator is now in preview mode at the time of writing this and uses Docker to make it available. Recently I wanted to setup Cosmos DB Emulator on Mac, but I did not want to set it up such that I keep it running always on my Mac. Instead, I decided to use my Synology NAS to host the emulator directly on my NAS as it is built on Linux and also because it allows the emulator running and available for me all the time. In this post we will see how t ..read more

I have already written how to publish HELM chart to ACR using Azure DevOps and GitHub actions. But did you know you can also publish HELM3 charts (or any OCI compliant package) to GitHub Container Registry(GCR)? In this post we will see how to do that. Enable improved container support GitHub Container Registry is currently in public beta. So, the first step is to ensure that you have enabled the GitHub Container Registry for your account. If you have GitHub personal account, you can do that from Feature Preview window. If you have a Enterprise account, you can do that going to Settings page ..read more

In my previous post, we briefly covered how to publish a HELM chart to ACR using Azure DevOps. In this post we will use GitHub actions to build and publish HELM chart to ACR using GitHub Actions. We will also take a sneak peak how GitHub environments work. Pre-requisites I am going to assume ACR instance is setup using repository scoped tokens. Since we already covered setting up of ACR this way in the earlier post, I will not include the steps here. Setting up secrets at GitHub We would like store Azure Container Registry’s tokens as GitHub repository level secrets. To do that, click on Sett ..read more

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) for Azure is a detailed guidance of patterns and practices to create and implement business and technology strategies necessary for organisations to move to the cloud. According to Microsoft, this guidance is adopted from various customers learnings from moving to cloud and Microsoft itself. In this post, we will see CAF’s starter template in Azure DevOps Demo generator helps customers Plan their cloud journey. The Cloud Adoption Framework documentation is neatly aligned to various phases (Strategy, Plan, Ready, Adopt, Govern and Organise) of customer’s ..read more

I have been bit late to Kubernetes world, but ever since I have started using it, I have been part of a great teams building awesome applications and using Helm package manager. With Helm, you package your Kubernetes application as charts, which are then stored in Helm chart repo. Helm also has a templating engine allowing you to set values in your charts dynamically allowing you to manage your applications more easily. Azure Container Registry (ACR) currently supports publishing Helm 3 charts to ACR and it is currently in preview. In this post we will see how we can publish a sample Helm char ..read more

Often when working with Kubernetes you might find yourself switching between your clusters or namespaces. I am doing this numerous times lately and I was slow switching using the regular commands. In this post, I would like to highlight two productivity utilities when working with Kubernetes which will make it simple when working with multiple clusters. Cluster contexts and namespaces Kubernetes stores the cluster information in ~/.kube/config file and stores in as a context information. If you are working against multiple clusters ideally you would have different config files and can referenc ..read more

TIBCO Rendezvous (RDV) is one of the popular messaging product for real-time data processing. Predominantly used in Financial corporations to process real-time trading, market data and efficient information flow between control systems. In this post, we will see how we can deploy this messaging application to RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 (on Azure VM) using Azure DevOps. Source: https://www.tibco.com/products/tibco-rendezvous For this post, we are assuming that we have a RHEL VM provisioned on Azure to which we are going to deploy. Also, the installers are downloaded published to Azure Art ..read more