Azure DevOps Multi-Stage Pipelines

As I move into using Azure DevOps more and more, there is one thing which I really haven’t got on with and that is release pipelines. I didn’t like that I couldn’t easily define it as YAML like I could with build pipelines, even though I don’t like them, there are a few things I do like — like approval gates. Environments Luckily, there are ways to get around this — the most simple way is to add an Environment and then add an Approval....

April 25, 2021 · 7 min · Russ Mckendrick

Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline

In my last post external link I wrote about how I created an Azure DevOps pipeline using Ansible in a more “Terraform” way, however, although I have used Terraform and Azure DevOps quite a bit I realised I didn’t really have a template for a pipeline. Before we look at the pipeline itself I should point out that is uses the the Terraform Azure Pipeline extension by Microsoft DevLabs  external linkfrom the Visual Studio Marketplace external link, if you are following along with this post please ensure that the extension is installed in your organisation before proceeding....

May 31, 2020 · 5 min · Russ Mckendrick

Azure DevOps Ansible Pipeline

I thought it was was about time that I started to have a play with Azure DevOps a little more than I have been doing, one of the things I have always meant to look at in the past is using DevOps to run Ansible playbooks. However the Ansible Task external link recommended by Microsoft has always put me off, the reason for this is that this task requires a Virtual Machine to run Ansible — this to me always seemed a little overkill....

May 10, 2020 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick

Ansible AWX

It has been a while as I have been busy writing, I thought I would spend some of my freetime having a very quick play with Ansible AWX external link, which is the Open Source version of Ansible Tower external link. I created the following Vagrantfile to launch a CentOS 7 external link server; # -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby : VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2" Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config| config.vm.box = "centos/7" config....

September 24, 2017 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick

Playing with Docker 1.13 & Minio

I had some time today, so I thought I would combine two posts I have been planning on writing for a week or two, looking at Docker 1.13 and also Minio. It is important to note before you read further that this post does not cover using Mino as a storage backend for containers. It is about launching a distributed Minio installation in a Docker Swarm cluster and consuming the storage using the Minio command line client and web interface....

January 21, 2017 · 10 min · Russ Mckendrick

UIs for Docker, a follow-up post

Following on from the post I wrote on Portainer; Portainer, a UI for Docker external link There was a lot of great feedback, like the following from Aleksandr Blekh, Ph.D. external link; Great post, thank you! Could you briefly clarify why/when one would want to prefer Portainer to Rancher and vice versa. It would be great, if you could also touch on benefits of using Docker UIs versus Kubernetes-based PaaS, specifically OpenShift (which has UI for Docker container management)....

January 15, 2017 · 7 min · Russ Mckendrick

Trying out Elastic Beats

I thought it was about time, as I had some to spare today, to have a play with one of the new feature of the Elastic family of products I have yet to try. Beats is the platform for single-purpose data shippers. They install as lightweight agents and send data from hundreds or thousands of machines to Logstash or Elasticsearch. I have used an ELK stack before external link but never for metrics, it always been for more traditional log files and tools such as Zabbix external link have been my goto for metrics....

January 2, 2017 · 7 min · Russ Mckendrick

Portainer, a UI for Docker

Part of my daily routine is to go through Reddit, RSS feeds and also wading through the MediaGlasses twitter external link account where I follow loads of technical people & companies. Over the lat week or so I have seen Portainer mentioned quite a lot, particularly since it has now had over 1M + pulls on the Docker Hub; Looks like Santa left @portainerio a nice christmas gift.. 1 Million @docker Pulls!...

December 29, 2016 · 9 min · Russ Mckendrick