Using a new VS Code extension to bring together Terraform, VS Code, Azure Cloud Shell and optimize the Terraform development experience

We take a look at using the popular open source log export, Fluent Bit, to export Kubernetes logs directly into Azure Log Analytics.

This week we saw a significant update to the ARM template for Cosmos DB, which now allows us to create databases and containers. Up until now, we’ve only been able to create Cosmos DB accounts using templates, we then had to create the databases, containers, tables etc. through PowerShell or the portal etc. With this update, we are now able to deploy much more of our Cosmos setup with ARM templates, including databases, containers, graphs, namespaces and tables.

This week we saw the announcement of the public preview of Windows Server Containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Windows support in AKS has been something we’ve been waiting for, for a while now and is excellent news for those trying to lift and shift Windows applications into containers. As we’ve discussed previously, if you can, using Linux containers is always going to give you the fastest start-up time and fewer complications, however not everyone can re-write their apps in .

If your working in Azure regularly at scale then it’s very likely you spend a fair amount of time at the command line using the Azure PowerShell cmdlets or Azure CLI (or both). This week at the Build conference Microsoft announced: “Windows Terminal” a new command line experience for Windows, which looks very interesting. It’s still in development, but you can download the source from Github and build it yourself if you’re interested in trying it out.

Maybe joy is not the right word, but tags can be a handy tool for organising and querying your Azure resources, and are something I find are often not used very well. In this article, we’ll take a look at why tags are useful and some examples of how you can use them and what you can do to ensure they are applied. Tags If you’ve not already seen them, tags allow you to add arbitrary key-value pairs to most (there are still some edge cases) resource in Azure.

If your authoring ARM templates then you can use pretty much any text editor, however, tools like Visual Studio and Visual Studio code offer some additional functionality to help you with the process. If you are using VS Code, then Microsoft has created the “Azure Resource Manager Tools” extension to add support for ARM templates. If your not already using this extension, then I recommend you install it, however, the features this extension provides are not always apparent.

When you deploy a service in AKS that is of type load balancer, or you create an Ingress, AKS will automatically create an NSG rule for you . This rule is applied to the NSG that is attached to your nodes NICs and will open up your services port to “All”. If your planning on publishing your application to be accessed by anyone then this is fine. However, if you want to lock access to your application down to specific users then this can be a bit of a pain.

Prometheus has become the default metrics collection mechanism for use in a Kubernetes cluster, providing a way to collect the time series metrics for your pods, nodes and clusters. This metric collection allows you to monitor for issues, review performance over time, and also provide metrics to be used by the scaling functionality in Kubernetes. Both the Pod and Cluster auto-scaler can take custom metrics from Prometheus and use these to determine if they can scale out.

This is a relatively new feature in Azure Resource Manager Templates that I wasn’t aware of until someone mentioned it to me today. It is now possible to catch the failure of an ARM template deployment and then trigger running a previous version of the template when this happens. I’m hesitant to call this a roll-back (even though the docs do), as there are some limitations that mean it’s not really a full roll-back, but it could be a useful tool to deal with failed deployments.