Paul's Blog

A collection of notes and stuff I find interesting

Bootstrap your GitOps-enabled AKS cluster with Terraform: A code sample using the Flux v2 K8s Extension

2023-09-28 6 min read GitOps Kubernetes Developer Tutorial
In my previous posts, we learned how to get started with GitOps on AKS using the K8s extension for AKS. Then, we took a look at the Flux CLI and explored how it can be used to bootstrap your cluster and generate FluxCD manifests so that we can use GitOps to implement GitOps 🤯, and implemented Flux’s image update automation capability. From there, we built on the concept of image update automation, and showed you how you can use Flagger to automate canary deployments. Continue reading

Progressive Delivery on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using Flagger with Istio and FluxCD

2023-09-26 13 min read GitOps Kubernetes Developer Tutorial
In my previous post, we setup an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to automatically update images based on new image tags in a container registry. As soon as a new image was pushed to the registry the image was immediately updated. But what if you don’t want an agent automatically pushing out new images without some sort of testing? 🤔 In this article, we’ll build upon Flux’s image update automation capability and add Flagger to implement a canary release strategy. Continue reading

Automating Image Updates with FluxCD on AKS

2023-09-22 13 min read GitOps Kubernetes Developer Tutorial
In my previous post, we walked through the setup of FluxCD on AKS via AKS extensions. In this article, we’ll go a bit deeper and take a look at how you can use FluxCD to automate image updates in your AKS cluster. The goal here is to streamline the process of updating your application deployments in your cluster. Here is our intended workflow: Modify application code, then commit and push the change to the repo. Continue reading

Git going with GitOps on AKS: A Step-by-Step Guide using FluxCD AKS Extension

2023-09-20 12 min read GitOps Kubernetes Developer Tutorial
In reading through @StevenMurawski’s blog post titled, What Really is GitOps? we learned that GitOps is a way to do Continuous Delivery of our applications on Kubernetes. In this post, I will jump right into how you can “git” going with GitOps by enabling the FluxCD AKS Extension on your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and using a tool called Kustomize to help with Kubernetes configuration management. We’ll deploy my new favorite demo app, AKS Store Demo to our AKS cluster and then make some changes to the application and see how FluxCD handles them. Continue reading

Efficient Configuration Management in AKS: Integrating Azure App Configuration for Seamless Loading of Key-Value Pairs into Config Maps

2023-06-13 8 min read Tutorial
Did you know that Azure App Configuration Service is a managed service that helps you centralize your application configuration? It provides a way to store all your app configs in one place and manage them centrally. It also provides a way to manage feature flags and control feature rollouts. I highlighted the feature management capabilities in a breakout session the Microsoft Build conference a few weeks ago. If you have not watched the session yet, you can find the recording here Continue reading

Effortlessly Deploy to Azure Kubernetes with Open Source Tools Draft and Acorn

2023-01-03 7 min read Tutorial
In this post, I’ll walk you through deploying a web application to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) without having to write any Docker or Kubernetes manifest files. Using open-source command-line tools Draft and Acorn, we’ll containerize and deploy to AKS in just a few steps! Let’s go 🚀 Pre-requisites Before you begin, make sure you have access to an Azure Subscription. You will also need to have the following tools installed on your machine. Continue reading

Service Mesh Considerations

2022-12-14 9 min read Architecture
“Build microservices”, they said… “it’ll be fun”, they said… There are many reasons why you would want to deploy a solution based on the microservices architectural pattern, but it comes at a cost. More microservices means more deployments to manage, more microservices to connect, more microservices to secure… yeah, it gets complex real quick. If you’re just getting started with microservices or have a small number of microservices deployed, you may have heard of the term “service mesh”, but not needed one yet. Continue reading
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