Marks Multiverse

When I started in IT, I could fairly easily acquire knowledge on my own. I bought an Intel NUC, installed VMware ESX, virtualized a few Windows servers and clients, and built my own Citrix workspace solution. This allowed me to imitate a system administrator at home. However, the world and my field of work have changed significantly since then. The system administrator now stands next to the brontosaurus in the museum, and my NUC has a chipset that cannot run Windows 11. The market now demands DevOps Engineers and Cloud Engineers. But how can you gain this knowledge in an accessible way? Simple. GitHub, GitHub Actions, and Azure. CI/CD at your kitchen table. ...

Of course we want to secure and keep our Azure tenant tidy with the help of Azure Policies. And without any hesitation I preach to automate everything! But what if these two mindsets conflict with one another? What if there is an Azure Policy in place that demands a naming standard or tags for resource groups that causes an automated Azure Image Builder deployment to fail? With Azure Image Builder (AIB) we can automate the process of building images for use in an Azure Virtual Desktop environment for instance. AIB automatically creates a resource group to store temporary resources which it needs to build the image (storage account, vnet ,vm, disk, etc.). When the build is complete Azure deletes most of these resources. This build resource group is given a random name that starts with IT_. When you have policies in place that enforce a certain naming convention of require certain tags on a resource group the AIB build will fail. But fortunately there is a way to make sure that the resource group makes use of the right naming convention and tags. ...

For database testing it is customary to make periodic copies of the production database and use the latest copy as a test database. But how does that work in a scenario where you use Azure SQL and a traditional Active Directory instance? And on top of that you obviously want to automate that process! Steps Steps involved: Create an Automation Account. Give the automation account the right permissions. Make the automation account administrator on the SQL server. Check and add modules. Set the variables in the automation account. Create a runbook. Schedule the runbook. Note: This is not a step-by-step tutorial but more a high-over instruction. ...