Stop using ARM templates! Use the Azure CLI instead

I was a big fan of ARM templates: for many years I’m applying ARM templates on a large number of projects for all kinds of customers. I’ve written articles and blog posts about ARM templates. Have given many workshops and started collecting ARM templates used in enterprises ready for production.  I’ve written the Best practices with ARM Templates article together with my colleague Peter Groenewegen, which is the most visited blog post of Xpirit and it’s also published by Microsoft. It’s clear I was a big fan of ARM templates. But times are changing.

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Handling settings and Environment Variables of your .NET Core 2 application hosted in a Docker container during development and on Kubernetes (Helm to the resque)

You have developed a microservice in .NET Core 2 and want to host it as a Docker Container in Kubernetes. Your Microservice contains settings, some appsettings or connectionstrings for example. These settings differ over environments. You can treat this configuration for Kubernetes on different ways. This blogposts shows you how to handle settings over environments prepared for Continuous Delivery.

Automate the deployment of .NET Core 2 Docker containers to Kubernetes with Azure Container Service and Azure Container Registry using VSTS

Previous blogpost coveres all steps to create a Docker Image from a .NET Core 2 WebAPI application on your local machine. After that, the Docker Image was pushed to Azure Container Registry (ACR). The deployment to Kubernetes pulled this Docker Image from ACR and runs a number of instances. All steps were executed manually. Let’s automate this using VSTS.

Enterprise Azure ARM Templates

Lately I’ve given many workshops to all kinds of customers of my employer Xpirit about the automatic deployment of Azure resources. Mainly with VSTS.

Infrastructure as Code and VSTS

Written by Peter Groenewegen and Pascal Naber for the Xpirit Magazine

Your team is in the process of developing a new application feature, and the infrastructure has to be adapted. The first step is to change a file in your source control system that describes your infrastructure. When the changed definition file is saved in your source control system it triggers a new build and release. Your new infrastructure is deployed to your test environment, and the whole process to get the new infrastructure deployed took minutes while you only changed a definition file and you did not touch the infrastructure itself.

VSTS Task to create a SAS Token

The Create SAS Token task creates a SAS Token which can be used to access a private Azure Storage Container. The task also gets the StorageUri. Both variables can be used in subsequent tasks, like the Azure Resource Group Deployment task. This is the first task of the Infrastructure as Code serie.

Create an Azure Service Principal and a VSTS ARM Endpoint

25-8-2016: Update because the UI to create a Service in VSTS changed

When you want to access Azure from VSTS there are multiple possibilities. It’s for example possible in VSTS to configure an Azure Classic Endpoint and after that configure the endpoint with credentials or with a certificate. The ARM way is to add an Azure Resource Manager Endpoint. To configure this you will need the settings of an Azure Service Principal. This blogpost tells you how to create both the Service Principal in Azure and the ARM Endpoint in VSTS.

VSTS Task to deploy AppSettings and ConnectionStrings to an Azure WebApp

The Azure WebApp Configuration task reads VSTS variables and adds those as AppSettings and ConnectionStrings to an Azure WebApp. The task also supports Slot Settings. The task can be linked to a web.config to validate if all AppSettings and ConnectionStrings in the web.config exists as VSTS variable.

Migrate TFS to Git

Maybe you’ve read about Git for a long time and use it for your private projects. Maybe you want to migrate your project’s TFS Version Control to Git, either with TFS Git or elsewhere, but don’t know how. Or maybe you’ve read Dennis Doomen’s post about ‘Why you should abandon TFS and adopt Git’ and though: ‘I really need to move over right now, but how?’ If you are using TFS you will probably have a history that you want to have in Git also.