Leveraging Azure Tags and Azure Graph for deploying to your Blue/Green environments

Introduction

For this post I am assuming you are pretty familiar with the concept of deployment strategies (if not check out this post by Etienne). Now these are typically seen from an application deployment level, where platforms (like for instance Kubernetes) typically have out-of-the box mechanisms in place to do this. Now what if you would want to do this on an “infrastructure level”, like for instance the Kubernetes version of Azure Kubernetes Service. We could do an in-place upgrade, which will carefully cordon and drain the nodes. Though what if things go bad? We could do a Canary, Blue/Green, A/B, Shadow, … on cluster level too? Though how would we tackle the infrastructure point of view of this? That is the base for today’s post!

 

Architecture at hand

For today’s post we’ll leverage the following high level architecture ;

This project leverages Terraform under the hood. Things like DNS, Traffic Manager, Key Vault, CosmosDB, etc are “statefull’ where its lifecycle is fully managed by Terraform. On the other hand, our kubernetes clusters are “stateless” from an Infrastructure-as-Code point-of-view. We deploy them via Terraform, though do not keep track of them… All the lifecycle management is done on operating on the associated tags afterwards.

 

Community-Tool-of-the-day

The drawing above was not created in Visio for once. The above was made leveraging CloudSkew, which was created by Mithun Shanbhag. Always awesome to see community contributions, which we can only applaud!

PowerApps & Functions – Where low/no-code meets serverless… organizations can create apps faster!

Introduction

Like many organization, you’re probably also looking for a more “rapid development” track for a subset of your applications. I’ve heard a lot of reasons for this… Going from rapid prototyping to having small apps that make life a lot easier within the organization (like typical approval flows). For this we’re going to see how we can combine PowerApps & Azure Functions! By using PowerApps we want to take a low/no-code approach to creating the front-end, where Functions (or even Logic Apps as an alternative) will allow us to provide specific back-end data.

Recipe for today

Today we’ll be using the following ingredients as a base for the recipe of the day ;

• Function Backend :  https://github.com/kvaes/azure-functions-turbinerepair (created after following this tutorial)
• PowerApps Tutorial : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-powerapps-scenario

Here we’ll be building a small powerapp that’ll call an API (OpenAPI Spec) that is hosted as an Azure function. So basically connecting a low/no-code app to a serverless API.

PHP Frameworks

This week I experimented with some frameworks to see which would provide me the fastest development track for some hobby projects of mine. When reading this post, bare in mind that I come from a Drupal background (so I’m quite spoiled!)… 😉

Requirements
I had a few requirements that such a framework should have:

• User Authentication : This is something almost every application needs in some form. If it was up to me, then this basic functionality should be included within easy framework. This was actually the first reason why I switched to Drupal, I was sick and tired to maintain the user management coding whilest this is a common thing.
• Good Documentation : I don’t mind learning new things, but they should be very clearly documented. I actually learned php right off the php.net site; hands-on with the user contributed code samples.
• Easy Setup on a shared hosting : Some frameworks are so high up in the sky that it takes you about an hour just to grasp the concept of how the creators wanted it to be. In my mind, it should just be “extract & go”… This doesn’t mean that it has to be a single directory structure. It’s merely meant towards the frameworks which have a “console-like” application to manage the framework. Not everyone has shell access to their development machine…
• Active User Community : A big part of the “Fast development track”-motivation lies in code submissions of the community behind the framework. You can borrow the code or you can learn from it… Either way, you’re coding at a much faster pace.
• Easy Form Support : Forms are a BIG part of every application. We can add some bling to it with “ajax” (hypeword detected!), but it remains a form in it’s bare essence.

My Basic Experience
Now for the ones that I’ve tested… Also I would like to add a word of respect to all the creators of the frameworks. This post is not to bash any frameworks, but just a form to express my experience with testing them all out.

Scrum & XP from the Trenches

Henrik Kniberg and InfoQ.com offer a free version for download of the book “Scrum & XP from the Trenches“.

This book includes:

• Practical tips and tricks for most Scrum and XP practices
• Typical pitfalls and how they were addressed
• Diagrams and photos illustrating day-to-day work
• Testing and test-driven development
• Scaling and coordinating multiple teams
• Dealing with resistance from inside and outside the team
• Planning and time estimation techniques
• Forwards by Jeff Sutherland and Mike Cohn

I’ve enjoyed reading the book and must say that I can recommended it to anyone interested in Scrum!