ARM Template – Creating NGINX Webfarm with Custom Script Extension

by | Sep 25, 2016

A friend of mine recently started working with Azure and loved it once he got the hang of it. I encouraged him to start using PowerShell to automate various Azure operations but it didn’t quite stick with him on the first try. He started automating Azure operations using the Azure CLI and while it’s not a bad tool, it’s quite lacking in features compared to PowerShell and I’m pretty sure that it will not be maintained much longer since Microsoft open sourced PowerShell and gave the Linux / Mac community a taste. The funny part of this story is that he’s a Windows user, uses Windows 10 and yet he’s still using Azure CLI.

Where am I going with this? While giving him some tips on how to deploy some production / staging environments in Azure, I saw how he was automating resource creation in Azure using the CLI. He basically created a golden image in a storage account and with 35 lines of Azure CLI code, he was provisioning the environments. That made me cringe and motivated me to teach him how to do it using ARM templates and custom scripts.
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Installing and Using PowerShell DSC on Linux

by | Jan 20, 2016

In the last two weeks I’ve been playing with PowerShell DSC for Linux and truth to be told I’m impressed on how stable it is since the last time I tried it. I started trying DSC for Linux first it came out and to be honest while it was nice, the bugs didn’t help that much and I always came up with something that made me revert back to a previous checkpoint be it compiling the OMI and DSC, pushing a configuration or breaking the OMI server after fiddling around the configuration files but hey that’s what you get when you’re trying out bleeding edge stuff right?
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