Derek C. Ashmore's Blog, page 2

For DevOps Professionals: Evolutionary Terraform

Organizations that use Terraform to manage cloud infrastructure often create and maintain Terraform modules as the code base grows. Inevitably, complexity increases with the introduction of reusable code. DevOps teams, I've worked with struggle with the level of modularization they should use and how to more easily manage it. 

I think of the modularization of Terraform as an evolutionary process. The level of modularization needed when organizations first start out is different from what they nee...

For DevOps Professionals: Barriers to 100% Infrastructure as Code

I was asked the other day why a particular part of the cloud infrastructure was added manually and not automated. I experienced déjà vu. It occurred to me that I've been asked that question at every client I've had since I got heavily into infrastructure code. We use the phrase "100% infrastructure as code" often. In fact, the overwhelmingly vast majority of cloud infrastructure is implemented via code. However, there is always some very tiny portion of the infrastructure that seems to be provid...

For Managers: Cloud Governance through Automation

Place automated guardrails on cloud usage instead of manual review processes. In short, when new policies are needed or existing policies modified, work with a cloud engineering team instead of adding manual review points. The benefits are:

Fewer review meetingsReduced manual labor with both management oversight and application team complianceAdded security as enforcement is more consistent and comprehensiveEvolves as your cloud usage grows and changesAllows decentralized management of cloud reso...

When to execute ARM Templates with Terraform

 

ARM templates are the native automation mechanism for the Azure cloud platform. It is possible to execute ARM templates from Terraform using resource azurerm_resource_group_template_deployment. To Azure professionals with less Terraform experience, this is appealing.  It allows them to use their existing skills and provides some short-term productivity gains. While I see the benefit, the tactic eliminates some of the benefits of using Terraform. 

Don't use Terraform to run ARM templates unless y...

Best Practices for Managing Feature Branches

Feature branches are a popular source code management tactic used to manage and coordinate changes made by development teams. Developers create a feature branch is created from the main branch (typically master) and then merge the changes made to that feature branch back to the main branch when they are complete. This isolates changes made for a specific feature and limits the effect of feature enhancements on other team members until the change is ready.

When using feature branches, it's rare to...

For Managers: DevOps Automation and Unintended Consequences

Most organizations adopting the cloud have adopted DevOps automation to some degree or another.  The primary reason is that continued manual maintenance isn't possible with the same staffing level and increased demand for a faster change rate. Many aren't to the point of achieving 100% automation but are striving for it. By "automation", I refer to Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automated builds and deployments (CI / CD Pipelines), machine image creation, security enforcement functions, etc. Most...

Design Patterns for Cloud Management and DevSecOps

With the cloud (it doesn't matter which cloud vendor), truly all infrastructure and application management is software-based now. Consequently, most organizations manage their cloud footprint through code. Some organizations are further along that path, but most strive to achieve 100% infrastructure as code. Additionally, application infrastructure and releases are also managed as code. 
Having written code to manage cloud infrastructure, application infrastructure, and application build and rele...

Streamlining Tagging in Terraform projects.

Tagging resources in Azure or AWS Terraform projects used to be such a mind-numbing pain before the release of Terraform 0.12. For each resource in a Terraform project, the tag section was very verbose and very repetitive.  Now, with new variable functionality that comes with Terraform 0.12, I've fallen into a much more streamlined way of maintaining tags.
Tagging before Terraform 0.12

Cloud Governance: Making DevOps Automation Effective

I see cloud automation of all types implemented to control and/or secure cloud assets. Examples of this type of automation using Amazon Web Services (AWS) include the following:Preventing unauthorized entries in security groups allowing ingress from 0.0.0.0/0 (security)Alerts for Creating IAM users (possible security risk)Forwarding application logs to Splunk (operational effectiveness)Scheduling up-time for non-production assets (cost savings)While these examples are AWS-specific, the princi...

Tips and Tactics for Passing the AWS Solution Architect Certification Exams

I've been using the AWS cloud platform since about 2010. When I embarked on the AWS certification path a couple of years ago, I knew it would be a challenge even with my experience. I knew professional level certs are some of the most challenging exams in IT. Having passed AWS Solution Architect Professional and Associate certification exams, I've been asked by several for tips on how to prepare and pass. The process is daunting given that the body of knowledge covered by the tests...