Setting up your cloud engineering Linux desktop environment

As technology professionals, we spend a TON of time in front of our computers. To be battle-station-ready, we need to have the right tools for the right job.

The first thing is the OS. For my Linux desktop, I like to use Elementary. It's an aptitude-based distro with a Mac-like feel. It's fast, steady, and I haven't had many problems. Remember to keep it up to date however. A cron job at every boot to run apt-update -y will do the trick.

https://elementary.io/

The next thing is your code-editor. A lot of distros come with one, but I prefer VSCode. VSCode has very quickly become a top-tier editor. The amazing amount of extensions alone makes it the top, if not, very close to the top. My top extensions are;

1. PowerShell
2. Python
3. Docker
4. Kubernetes
5. YAML

https://code.visualstudio.com/

Since I work on both Azure and AWS, I need PowerShell to manage Azure. For this, PowerShell Core is the way. Below is instructions depending on your distro.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/install/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-6

The next thing we need to test on our cloud environments is the cloud's CLI and API. Working on both AWS and Azure, we'll need awscli and az (az is Azure's CLI). Along with this, PowerShell can import az and you'll have cmdlets at your disposal.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/install-linux.html
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli?view=azure-cli-latest

I'll need to be able to test some micro services and containers. For this, we'll definitely need Docker. We won't run production-level workloads from our Linux desktop, but we'll need to have the ability to test containers on the fly.

https://docs.docker.com/v17.12/install/#cloud

Now that we have Docker installed, we need some Kubectl. Kubectl from your Linux terminal will allow you to run your Kubernetes config locally so you can connect to your orchestration system6.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/

The final thing, as in most desktops, we need a good web browser. I prefer Chrome.

Comments

DevOps tooling in the Microsoft realm

When I really started to dive into automation and practicing DevOps with specific tooling, there were a few key players. At the time Microsoft was not one of them. They were just starting to embrace the open source world, including the art and practice of DevOps. Since then Microsoft has went all in and the tech giant has made some incredible tooling. Recently I switched to a Microsoft-heavy environment and I love it. I went from AWS/Python/Ansible/Jenkins to Azure/PowerShell/ARM/Azure DevOps. My first programming language was PowerShell so being back in the saddle allowed me to do a full circle between all of the different types of tooling in both worlds. Today I want to share some of that tooling with you.

The first thing I want to talk about is ARM. What is ARM? ARM is a configuration management tool that allows you to perform software-defined-infrastructure. Much like Ansible and Terraform, ARM allows you to define what you want your environment to look like at scale. With ARM, yo…

Monitoring your containers in an AKS cluster with Prometheus

Monitoring and alerting is arguably one of the most important thing in Cloud Engineering and DevOps. It's the difference between your clients stack being up and a client being down. Most of us have SLA's to abide by (for good reason). Today we're going to learn how to spin up Prometheus in an AKS cluster to monitor our applications.

Pre-reqs;
1. Intermediate knowledge of Kubernetes
2. An AKS cluster spun up in Azure

Recently AKS supports Prometheus via Helm, so we'll use that for an automated solution to spin this up. This installs kube-prometheus, which is a containerized version of the application. With raw Prometheus, there are a few things that are needed for the operator;

1. Prometheus: Defines a desired deployment.
2. ServiceMonitor: Specifies how groups of services should be monitored
3. Alertmanager: Defines the operator to ensure services and deployments are running by matching the resource

With kube-prometheus, it is all packaged for you. This means configuri…

Run PowerShell code with Ansible on a Windows Host

Ansible is one of the Configuration Manager kings in the game. With it's easy-to-understand syntax and even easier to use modules, Ansible is certainly a go-to when you're picking what Configuration Management you want to use for your organization. Your question may be "but Ansible is typically on Linux and what happens when I'm in a Windows environment?". Luckily I'm here to tell you that Ansible will still work! I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it is to use Ansible on Windows with a little WinRM magic. Let's get started.

Pre-requisites for this post:
1) WinRM set up to connect to your Windows host from Ansible
2) Ansible set up for Windows Remote Management
3) SSH access to the Ansible host
4) Proper firewall rules to allow WinRM (port 5985) access from your Ansible host to your Windows host
5) Hosts file set up in Ansible that has your IP or hostname of your Windows Server.
6) At least one Linux host running Ansible and one Windows Server host …

The Life Of An Engineer

Search This Blog