Infrastructure as Code for Beginners is out now

I am pleased to announce that my latest book, “Infrastructure as Code for Beginners,” is now available for purchase. Over the last six months, I have fully dedicated myself to this project, channeling my experience and knowledge into providing a resource that simplifies the complexities of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The importance of IaC cannot be overstated in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. IaC ensures consistent and repeatable deployment of cloud-based services, thereby saving time while delivering robust results....

June 4, 2023 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

Ansible setup with Azure on a new Mac

Following on from upgrading my Macs to all M1-based ones, I get around to finally needing to use Ansible; typically, I would install Python using PyEnv and then run the following … It should just work?!?! pip install --user ansible pip install --user -r https://github.com/ansible-collections/azure/blob/dev/requirements-azure.txt ansible-galaxy collection install azure.azcollection … and away we go, but this time I came across a few problems. The first was the following error when installing the requirements using the remote requirements-azure....

December 28, 2021 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

VSCode + Bicep on an M1 Mac

Probably a little late to the party with this one, but I have recently upgraded to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, for the most part, the problems with moving to arm64 are not as bad as I thought - most are annoying little things. However, the biggest one came when I decided to take a serious look at Bicep. After installing the Bicep VSCode extension external link and opening a test Bicep file, I was greeted with the following message …...

December 4, 2021 · 3 min · Russ McKendrick

Managing Python on macOS Monterey

This week was not only the release of macOS Monterey, but it was also new Mac Book Pro week for a lot of people, including myself. Given that it was alot of effot to install Python on macOS Big Sur I was a little worried that it would take the same amount of effort. As I was starting a with a clean macOS Monterey installation and had already installed Homebew external link I just needed to run the following command to install pyenv external link :...

October 30, 2021 · 2 min · Russ McKendrick

Running Podman on macOS

Last weekend I posted about Docker Desktop Alternatives for macOS, and it looks like I missed one as the week before Podman external link release version v3.3.0 external link which introduced support for macOS by allowing you to launch a Podman managed virtual machine. So, What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode....

September 12, 2021 · 8 min · Russ McKendrick

Docker Desktop Alternatives for macOS

After the news earlier this week that Docker will be introducing charges to the Docker Subscription Service Agreement, as detailed in the Tweet below: We're updating and extending our product subscriptions! New subscription tiers include Personal, Pro, Team, and Business. Details here: https://t.co/pyDetDKGjC #Docker #Subscriptions pic.twitter.com/Or8l6YoIUO — Docker Build Cloud is here! 🐳🧱☁️ (@Docker) August 31, 2021 I started to think about looking at alternatives, while I use Docker Desktop I did not use it enough to warrant looking at one of the new subscriptions....

September 5, 2021 · 12 min · Russ McKendrick

Some Terraform Azure Notes

I have just finished working on a few large Terraform Azure deployments, thought I would stick a few notes down in a blog post so that I can refer to them in the future as well as hopefully being useful to others. Azure Diagnostic Settings While the azurerm_monitor_diagnostic_setting resource can be used to apply diagnostic settings to pretty much any other resource, however, as each resource has different logs and metrics figuring them out can be a chore....

August 30, 2021 · 6 min · Russ McKendrick

Rocky Linux and Packer

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer external link locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/ external link : Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project external link has been announced, developed and then released....

August 28, 2021 · 4 min · Russ McKendrick