Azure Automation

How to Build Octopus Deploy High Availability in Microsoft Azure

If your team is working on a P1 and S1 issue which impacts the business a lot. During this time if your deployment and configuration management tools are not available to push the application fixes into production then cost to the company is huge. Building a high availability deployment tool are normally ignored or at bottom of backlog in many organisations. This blog post is more about how to…

Past, Now and Future of cloud computing (azure, aws,…) ?

ONE MIGHT SAY ADOPTING CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES IS EASIER AND QUICKER, I SAY IT MIGHT BE A BIG CASH EATER IF YOU DON’T PLAN AND DO IT PROPERLY In this article there are three phases been discussed as emerging phase, adoption phase and dream accelerating phase of cloud technologies. Past – Few years ago, when talking to engineers and business about moving infrastructure and application in cloud was a…

Top 3’s, why you should use PowerShell DSC.

Write once and run on as many server as you like which helps being productive and spare time to do interesting tasks. Always maintains the desired state, even when humans try to change settings on servers so that your confidence level is high about the environments you build. Source controlled , version of changes can be tracked and best things share the knowledge across the organisation to…

Here you go  Building infrastructure manually by point and click means you lose integrity between environmens deployment abd testing aspects of application becames harder. Unable to demonstrate that Dev, Test , Integration , Staging and production are configured in same way because humans are generally not very good in repetitive tasks rather they are innovator’s. Turn around time to build new…

5 Steps and under 30 minutes to deploy ARM Templates via Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy have been really up in the game of constantly adopting to the cloud Platform. Here is one of the example of deploy azure resource manager templates via octopus deploy. Authoring a resource manager template in visual studio, source control in Git based visual studio team services , build using the VSTS build system with the hosted agent and deploy the infrastructure via octopus…

Continuous Delivery – ASP.Net Core web applications using Visual Studio Team Services and Octopus Deploy Hosted in Azure

This article should help you get started with Continuous delivery pipeline using Visual Studio Team Services and Octopus Deploy. This blog post came out after playing with ASP.Net Core applications. To get it working it was bit fiddly but towards the end I got it working. Building applications and Deploying application in azure is getting easier and smooth every day by day. Below Steps should not…

5 Clicks and under 15 minutes – Octopus Deploy running in Microsoft Azure (CI tools as Code)

Automation of application deployment is highly important aspects when you want to achieve continuous delivery/deployment . At the same time, you need to have to tools supporting continuous deployment to be automated as well. Octopus Deploy have done a great work in getting started through this route.

“Octopus Deploy is a first class citizen in the world of Deployments”

Login to azure portal and…

Data Flow ====> Production –> Staging –> Integration –> Test –> Dev

I have been working with various clients with different kind of requirements for each one of them. Thinking about it all of them lead to one common purpose. What is that? We develop applications and write automated tests to validate them on regular basis or on each release and even on nightly to run wide range of tests. One of the…

Create Microsoft Azure VMs(Windows) from Custom VHDs

In the previous post we have seen how we can create custom images of Microsoft Azure VM’s without going through the painful process of downloading and uploading large blob. Please follow the link to for simple instructions.

The custom VHD’s will be created on the same storage account where your vm is hosted from but on a different folder/container location which is under…

Capture Custom VM Images (VHDs) for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines

Recently I have been asked from the community about how we can capture images like we do in AWS for creating the custom images . First, the answer is simple but really confusing because using Microsoft products for so long people might think I would direct them using the UI. But I didn’t because you can’t do this via UI for the machines built using the ARM model most people call it as Azure V2…

How to restore Deleted Azure SQL Databases – Microsoft Azure

This is a fine sunny day, writing a blogpost siting in my garden is really very relaxing. This is a simple blog post, how to recover the azure sql databases if it’s been accidently delete or in some other manner. Below script will help you to restore the databases. Also, I had a comment on one of my past post saying not to have passwords in the script. Hence this version been amended. Hope this…

101 – Packer by HasiCorp with Azure Resource Manager by Microsoft

During the weekend I thought creating an azure resource manager based packer image should be easier and simpler. But it turned out to be lot more tweaking than I anticipated. At the end its all worth it, here are the detailed steps to get things work if you are interested in this route. To be honest support from the packer community is great and responses are instant. Creating all the below using…

4 Days Continuous Cycling – Action Medical Research

4 Days of cycling, 523 Kilometers , 26h and 43 minutes on saddle Pedalling , 11,581 feet elevation

Switched mode from Continuous Delivery to Continuous Cycling, but I learnt the concept is same. Making the miles in a slower pace means you don’t crash towards end of the day.

Last year this time I have signed up doing this challenge of riding the bike over 500 kilometres by cycling from London to…

In Enterprise World – Silos…. Silos….? No, it’s all about Communication within Organisation

In enterprise world, last few years we have always discussed about how to avoid silos in the team and work as a team to deliver company goals. We have business analyst, developers, QA’s, operations and support team always working on their own little world with their SLA’s. If you think in last few years DevOps have emerged to be the most popular. Along with that, we have started the…

Top 10 thoughts – Building a High Performing Team

Building a high performing team is always challenging and there isn’t really a set of defined rules you can follow to establish the dream team you want to build. In this blog post I’m going to outline few of the cherry picked general principles you can follow to help you in the right direction

Involved and be part of the team.

[As a front-line soldier]

Have/find the people with right skill…

Overview below are the list of tasks needs to be completed

Download Docker

Copy Docker files to Container

Start the Docker process

Enable Firewall on Nano Server Container Host

Start the Docker Daemon

Manager Docker remotely

Download Docker, wget is not available on the nano server so, this have to be done on client

wget https://aka.ms/tp4/docker -OutFile C:\Containers\Tools\docker.exe

C…

PowerShell – Ways to Update XML Data

Let’s do a quick overview of the simple XML file. Below diagram should represent the xml structure

Below is the actual XML File

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <carsdealers> <car make="GM"> <Gear type="Auto">5</Gear> <Drivemode>FourWheel</Drivemode> <year>2015</year> <price>30000.00</price> <discount>750.00</discount> </car> </carsdealers>

Let’s, Just into…