Chris McKeown - DevOpsFu

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Chris McKeown

Terraform Native Testing Framework: Are you testing what you think you're testing?

With the release of Terraform version 1.6, the previously experimental testing framework became generally available. If you've already been writing tests for your Terraform code using something like Terratest or tftest, you might want to take a look to see if this new framework might simplify your CI pipelines.

Hosting this blog in Kubernetes

As of about a week or so ago, this blog is now hosted in Kubernetes. Obligatory: Deployed my blog on Kubernetes pic.twitter.com/XHXWLrmYO4 — dex (@dexhorthy) April 24, 2017 Seriously though, it was a great learning experience, bringing together a number of different moving parts into an automated, repeatable

Enabling the Calico CNI provider with Minikube on Hyper-V

(NOTE: Although this blog post is specifically about Minikube on Windows using the Hyper-V hypervisor, this may be useful for other host operating systems and hypervisors too. YMMV) (NOTE 2: Since Minikube version 1.7.3 was released, this now works much more smoothly. I've left my instructions in place

Automating Linkerd installation on Kubernetes in Terraform

(Edited 17-Feb-2020 due to an updated Helm chart from Linkerd) If you're looking at deploying your containerised services on Kubernetes, you'd do well to consider some kind of service mesh to go with it. And if you're looking for something that's easy to install, you can't go far wrong with

A Journey through Email, Webhooks, Azure Functions and Terraform Part II: Webhooks

I only became aware of the concept of Webhooks in 2014. Their concept has been around a few years longer than that, and you'll find very few SaaS products that don't leverage them in some way or other. And they're popular for good reasons: they're an incredibly simple concept, can

A Journey through Email, Webhooks, Azure Functions and Terraform Part I: The Problem

Introduction This is the first part in a series of posts about how a pretty simple problem with outbound email led me down some interesting paths of automation. How it all started I help to maintain the infrastructure for the website of GP Systems, the company my Dad runs. This

Robust, Asynchronous, Throttled file transfers using PowerShell

(Shamelessly copied from an article I wrote for work) Sometimes you have a bunch of My Little Pony episode files in MP4 format on a box, and you want to transfer them across the network to another box. Except these boxes are in Azure with flaky VNet links that don't

Auto Renewal of Let's Encrypt Certificates on systemd-Based Systems

After setting up a couple of sites (including this one) with Let's Encrypt free certificates to enable HTTPS, I looked at what I had made and saw that it was good. So I sort of left it at that. I was aware that the certificates issued had a very short

Terraform, Destroy Provisioners and Pre-Staging Octopus Deploy Tentacle Certificates

At work we've spent the last 12 months or more rebuilding our platform in Terraform. We previously had automation around deploying the VMs themselves (and Puppet would take over the configuration when the machines came up), but other stuff such as setting up Virtual Networks, VPN gateways and routing, Domain

Slinging Puppet code on Windows

(My) Tools of the Trade If you spend any significant amount of time writing Puppet modules or manifests and adding YAML config data for Hiera, you're going to want some linting and validation tools in your arsenal. Here's mine: The Base Software * Atom - A great editor from the people

When is a Fact not a Fact?

When it's sorta wrong. That's when. The :ipaddress fact is one of a bunch of core facts that Facter provides by default. The Facter documentation states that, for a Windows host, this fact is populated according to the following: * On Windows, it attempts to use the socket library and resolve

Azure PaaS Endpoint ACLs Part 1 - Overview

Azure PaaS endpoint ACLs were recently announced to make securing Cloud Services containing Web and Worker Roles easier; prior to this you had to use firewall rules on the Windows VMs themselves, which needed to be created using a startup task and a bit of scripting to invoke netsh or

Backing up Site Content from an Azure WebJob

Being from an Ops background, I am generally predisposed to worry about keeping regular backups of stuff. So, before I even started writing this blog, I wanted to make sure I wouldn't lose any of the blog posts through a failure of the site - or more likely an error

Hello, World.

So I started a blog. This may not last. You might not read it anyway. Actually, if you're not reading this right now, let me know why and I'll try to fix it. DevOps. Some people hate the word. Personally I find it encapsulates what I've been trying to do