Those reading my blog and social feeds over the last few years know how much of a fan of automation and infrastructure as code I am. I never profess or claim expert level skills, but I’ve been able to hack around some useful tools and entry level ideas from which others can build off. I’ve […] Read More
HashiConf took place a couple of weeks ago now, and during the event I presented a community based Lightning Talk live. The session is based on using Infrastructure as Code tooling to enhance mundane deployments and in the talk, I talk through how mundane approaches are still being used by lots of people and why […] Read More
HashiConf Digital gets underway shortly and will offer two days of product reveals, technical sessions and Lightning Talks attracting a huge number of attendees from around the devops world. It is free and open to all. I’m looking forward to attending a few sessions virtually to see what HashiCorp has to offer and to see […] Read More
HashiConf Digital gets underway shortly and will offer three days of technical sessions and workshops attracting an estimated 6000 attendees from around the world and is open to all. My faith in virtual conferences was restored last week with a well executed VeeamON conference, so i’m looking forward to attending a few sessions virtually to […] Read More
My recent obsession with automation and Infrastructure as Code in general has resulted in a lot of efficiencies in my day to day work life. Where I used to deploy Windows Templates manually through vSphere, I now use Terraform to handle repeatable deployments of lab server instances. I use Ansible and Chocolatey to install and […] Read More
Bootstrapping Windows during automated deployments is one of the more frustrating aspects of working with templates that are being deployed by Infrastructure as Code toolsets. When I say bootstrapping, i’m talking about executing post deployment actions on templates such as configuring WinRM or setting Windows Firewall settings to allow for future operations after deployment. VMware […] Read More
When deploying and configuring Linux as part of my Terraform plans, I have generally used a combination of script based or in-line Remote-Exec declarations to get the job done. A while back, while working on my Ansible CentOS Terraform deployment hack, I came across the following error when the executable shell script got to the […] Read More
In the continuing spirit of Terraforming all things, when I started to look into Ansible I wanted a way to have the base Control Node installed in a repeatable and consistent way. The setup and configuration of Ansible can be tricky and what I learnt in configuring the Ansible Control Node is that there can […] Read More
I’ve been working on a project over the last couple of weeks that has enabled me to sharpen my Terraform skills. There is nothing better than learning by doing and there is also nothing better than continuously improving code through more advanced constructs and methods. As this project evolved it became apparent that I would […] Read More
vSphere Tags are used to add attributes to VMs so that they can be used to help categorise VMs for further filtering or discovery. vSphere Tags have a number of use cases of which Melissa has a great blog post here on the power of vSphere Tags, their configuration and their application. Veeam fully supports […] Read More