After 6 books with many authors from Packt, APress, & Sams/Pearson I finally had the chance to author a book with O’Reilly. This is an ebook so it can be found and read on the O’Reilly online platform.
It is a great platform that I use personally for my own learning. On their platform, you can find ebooks, books across many publishers (most of my books are on there), video training, and even live training.
This book brings together 4 exciting technologies/topics including Azure, Kubernetes, GitOps, and multi-cloud. The book is shorter than my typical books since it is an ebook. It is only 35 pages and is designed for fast & easy consumption to get an overview of the technology and get an early start.
In this book, we take a journey into one of Microsoft’s newest cloud services Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes (Arc K8s). We explore what Azure Arc K8s is, how it extends the Azure control plane to Kubernetes clusters to manage, secure, and govern them, as well as how GitOps sits are the core of application deployment to Kubernetes clusters and a driver of consistent configuration management for Kubernetes clusters.
Azure Arc is a Microsoft product that promises to extend the Azure control plane for Kubernetes across multiple clouds and on-premises, but how does it do this? In this ebook we will dissect Azure Arc K8s and how it becomes a secret weapon for managing Kubernetes clusters across on-premises, multiple clouds, and regardless of your own rolled Kubernetes clusters or managed services based Kubernetes clusters such as GKE, EKS, etc. I also want to give a shout-out to Michael Levan for reviewing this ebook!
Key Areas from the ebook include:
-Understand the new management challenges that multicloud brings -Learn how Azure Arc drives consistent governance, security, and management across multicloud -Gain valuable insights into Microsoft’s Azure ARM control plane for Kubernetes -Learn how Azure Arc manages Kubernetes clusters across on-premises and multiple cloud deployments -Explore the GitOps technology pattern and operating model for cloud native applications and Kubernetes -Use Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes and GitOps to deploy configurations and applications to Kubernetes clusters
I will be speaking at the LASU TechX conference on Friday. I will be talking about the “Available Container Technologies in Azure”. I will go into what containers are, how they compare to VM’s, types of containers, things to consider before containerizing applications, what container service in Azure to use in what case, and more.
About The Event:
LASU TechX conference is an event that is aimed at attracting students and all tech enthusiasts within and outside the university (Lagos State University). This event is co-organized by Kazeem Adegboyega.
Speakers include:
Microsoft MVP – Samuel Erskine Microsoft MVP – Isidora Kitanic Chris Hoard Microsoft MVP – Adnan Hendricks Microsoft Employee – Holly Lehman Microsoft MVP – Steve Buchanan Ayodeji Folarin
Here is a flyer for the event:
For more details on the event and to register go here:
I am excited to announce that I am one of the experts in several Ask the Expert sessions during Microsoft Ignite 2020 this week.
I will be a part of a variety of sessions with topics ranging from Linux and PowerShell on Azure, Kubernetes on Azure, Azure Migration, and Transforming Windows Server workloads in Azure.
Here is the link to the Ignite home page myignite.microsoft.com. I hope to see you on the digital Ignite event and in one of the Ask the Expert Sessions!
Update 9/30/2020
Being a part of several Ask the Expert sessions was really fun! My most memorable session was the Ask the Expert: Linux and PowerShell on Azure session.
This session was packed full of superstars from Microsoft product groups and fellow MVPs including; Jeffery Snover, Jason Helmick, Janaka Rangama, and Alexander Nikolić. Here is a screenshot from the session:
After the session, I tweeted about the session and shared some wisdom about PowerShell, and both Jeffery Snover and Jason Helmick retweet my tweet!
2020 is not all bad. It’s pretty cool when the inventor of PowerShell and the PowerShell Program Manager retweet you!
Today I went on “Tech Talk Wednesday” a podcast and radio show with Kazeem Adegboyega The topic was “30 Minutes of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)“. It streamed online via Microsoft Teams and aired in Lagos, Nigeria on Lagos State University (LASU) radio (95.7).
I had a great time talking with Kazeem! Even Sam Erskine made a guest appearance. If you missed the live show you can watch it on YouTube:
I am honored to be a guest next Wednesday, August 26th on the “Tech Talk Wednesday” podcast and radio show with Kazeem Adegboyega (@KazeemCanTeach)! We will be chatting about Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
This show will be streamed online via Microsoft Teams and will air in Lagos, Nigeria on Lagos State University (LASU) radio (95.7)!
One of my goals is to help spread knowledge about tech in Africa and showcase African technologists in the US. This is the first step in that journey.
I recently had the honor of being a guest on the “Lisa at the Edge” Podcast. Lisa is a Microsoft Hybrid Cloud Strategist and an influencer in the hybrid cloud community based out of Scotland. She runs a blog and this year she started a popular podcast.
On Lisa’s podcast, she covers Careers in Tech and Microsoft Hybrid Cloud and a range of other topics with experts across the tech community.
This is an episode you don’t want to miss. This was one of the most entertaining podcasts I have been on. It took some interesting turns in regards to topics and very engaging. In the podcast episode Lisa and I talk about:
Evolving your career as technology evolves
Transformation of IT dept to Strategic Business Partner
In Kubernetes, you have a container or containers running as a pod. In front of the pods, you have something known as a service. Services are simply an abstraction that defines a logical set of pods and how to access them. As pods move around the service that defines the pods it is bound to keeps track of what nodes the pods are running on. For external access to services, there is typically an Ingress controller that allows access from outside of the Kubernetes cluster to a service. An ingress defines the rules for inbound connections.
Microsoft has had an
Application Gateway Ingress Controller for Azure Kubernetes Service AKS in
public preview for some time and recently released for GA. The Application
Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC) monitors the Kubernetes cluster for ingress
resources and makes changes to the specified Application Gateway to allow
inbound connections.
This allows you to leverage the Application Gateway service in Azure as the entry into your AKS cluster. In addition to utilizing the Application Gateway standard set of functionality, the AGIC uses the Application Gateway Web Application Firewall (WAF). In fact, that is the only version of the Application Gateway that is supported by the AGIC. The great thing about this is that you can put Application Gateways WAF protection in front of your applications that are running on AKS.
This blog post is not a detailed deep dive into AGIC. To learn more about AGIC visit this link: https://azure.github.io/application-gateway-kubernetes-ingress. In this blog post, I want to share a script I built that deploys the AGIC. There are many steps to deploying the AGIC and I figured this is something folks will need to deploy over and over so it makes sense to make it a little easier to do. You won’t have to worry about creating a managed identity, getting various id’s, downloading and updating YAML files, or installing helm charts. Also, this script will be useful if you are not familiar with sed and helm commands. It combines PowerShell, AZ CLI, sed, and helm code. I have already used this script about 10 times myself to deploy the AGIC and boy has it saved me time. I thought it would be useful to someone out there and wanted to share it.
I typically deploy RBAC enabled AKS clusters so this script is set up to work with an RBAC enabled AKS cluster. If you are deploying AGIC for a non-RBAC AKS cluster be sure to view the notes in the script and adjust a couple of lines of code to make it non-RBAC ready. Also note this AGIC script is focused on brownfield deployments so before running the script there are some components you should already have deployed. These components are:
VNet and 2 Subnets (one for your AKS cluster and one for the App Gateway)
AKS Cluster
Public IP
Application Gateway
The script will
deploy and do the following:
Deploys the AAD Pod Identity.
Creates the Managed Identity used by the AAD Pod Identity.
Gives the Managed Identity Contributor access to Application Gateway.
Gives the Managed Identity Reader access to the resource group that hosts the Application Gateway.
Downloads and renames the sample-helm-config.yaml file to helm-agic-config.yaml.
Updates the helm-agic-config.yaml with environment variables and sets RBAC enabled to true using Sed.
Adds the Application Gateway ingress helm chart repo and updates the repo on your AKS cluster.
Installs the AGIC pod using a helm chart and environment variables in the helm-agic-config.yaml file.
Now let’s take a look at running the script. It is recommended to upload to and run this script from Azure Cloud shell (PowerShell). Run:
./AGICDeployment.ps1 -verbose
You will be prompted
for the following as shown in the screenshot:
Enter the name of the Azure Subscription you want to use.:
Enter the name of the Resource Group that contains the AKS Cluster.:
Enter the name of the AKS Cluster you want to use.:
Enter the name of the new Managed Identity.:
Here is a screenshot
of what you will see while the script runs.
That’s it. You don’t have to do anything else except entering values at the beginning of running the script. To verify your new AGIC pod is running you can check a couple of things. First, run:
kubectl get pods
Note the name of my
AGIC pod is appgw-ingress-azure-6cc9846c47-f7tqn.
Your pod name will be different.
Now you can check
the logs of the AGIC pod by running:
kubectl logs appgw-ingress-azure-6cc9846c47-f7tqn
You should not have
any errors but if you do they will show in the log. If everything ran fine the
output log should look similar to:
After its all said and done you will have a running Application Gateway Ingress Controller that is connected to the Application Gateway and ready for new ingresses.
This script does not deploy any ingress into your AKS cluster. That will need to be done in addition to this script as you need. The following is an example YAML code for an ingress. You can use this to create an ingress for a pod running in your AKS cluster.
These days the growth of Kubernetes is on fire! Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes offering is one of the fastest-growing products in the Azure portfolio of cloud services with no signs of slowing down. For some time me and two fellow Microsoft MVPs Janaka Rangama (@JanakaRangama) and Ned Bellavance (@Ned1313) have been working hard on an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) book. We are excited that the book has been finished and is currently in production. The publisher Apress plans to publish it on December 28th, 2019.
Besides my co-authors, we had additional rock stars to help with this project. For the Tech Review, we had the honor to work with Mike Pfeiffer (@mike_pfeiffer) Microsoft MVP, Author, Speaker, CloudSkills.fm podcast and Keiko Harada (@keikomsft) Senior Program Manager – Azure Compute – Containers. Shout out to them and huge thanks for being a part of this!
We also had the honor of the foreword being written by Brendan Burns (@brendandburns) Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and co-founder of Kubernetes. A shout out to him and a world of thanks for taking the time to help with this project!
In this book, we take a journey inside Docker containers, container registries, Kubernetes architecture, Kubernetes components, and core Kubectl commands. We then dive into topics around Azure Container Registry, Rancher for Kubernetes management, deep dive into AKS, package management with HELM, and using AKS in CI/CD with Azure DevOps. The goal of this book is to give the reader just enough theory and lots of practical straightforward knowledge needed to start running your own AKS cluster.
For anyone looking to work with Azure Kubernetes Service or already working with it, this book is for you! We hope you get a copy and it becomes a great tool you can use on your Kubernetes journey.
I want to share here about Docker training I will be attending later this month June 24th/25th, 2019. It is a Docker JumpStart Virtual Workshop. I am excited about this training because it will be delivered by a fellow Microsoft MVP’s Dan Wahlin and Mike Pfeiffer. Also Dan Wahlin is a Docker Captain.
For those that don’t know a Docker Captain is like a Microsoft MVP but for Docker. There will even be some Kubernetes covered on day 2. This is shaping up to be some great training.
As of now there is still room in this class and its less than $300 USD! If you have wanted to get up to speed on Docker this is a good low cost way to do it. Here is a link to sign up: Docker JumpStart Workshop
Here is what will be covered across the 2 days (from the training website):
Lately I have been hearing a lot about a solution named Rancher in the Kubernetes space. Rancher is an open source Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Operations and Workload Management solution. You can learn more about Rancher here: https://www.rancher.com.
In short you can use
Rancher to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters deployed to Azure, AWS, GCP
their managed Kubernetes offerings like GCE, EKS, AKS or even if you rolled
your own. Rancher also integrates with a bunch of 3rd party solutions for
things like authentication such as Active Directory, Azure Active Directory,
Github, and Ping and logging solutions such as Splunk, Elasticsearch, or a
Syslog endpoint.
Recently training
opened up for some Rancher/Kubernetes/Docker training so I decided to go. The
primary focus was on Rancher while also covering some good info on Docker and
Kubernetes. This was really good training with a lot of hands on time, however
there was one problem with the labs. The labs had instructions and setup
scripts ready to go to run Rancher local on your laptop or on AWS via
Terraform. There was nothing for Azure.
I ended up getting
my Rancher environment running on Azure but it would have been nice to have
some scripts or templates ready to go to spin up Rancher on Azure. I did find
some ARM templates to spin up Rancher but they deployed an old version and it
was not clear in the templates on where they could be updated to deploy the new
version of Rancher. I decided to spend some time building out a couple of ARM
templates that can be used to quickly deploy Rancher on Azure and add a
Kubernetes host to Rancher. In the ARM template I pulled together it pulls the
Rancher container from Docker Hub so it will always deploy the latest version.
In this blog post I will spell out the steps to get your Rancher up and running
in under 15 minutes.
The repository consists of ARM templates for deploying Rancher and a host VM for Kubernetes. NOTE: These templates are intended for labs to learn Rancher. They are not intended for use in production.
In the repo ARM Template #1 named RancherNode.JSON will deploy an Ubuntu VM with Docker and the latest version of Rancher (https://hub.docker.com/r/rancher/rancher) from Docker Hub. ARM Template #2 named RancherHost.JSON will deploy an Ubuntu VM with Docker to be used as a Kubernetes host in Rancher.
Node Deployment
Deploy the
RancherNode.JSON ARM template to your Azure subscription through “Template
Deployment” or other deployment method. You will be prompted for the
following info shown in the screenshot:
Host Deployment
Deploy the
RancherHost.JSON ARM template to your Azure subscription through “Template
Deployment” or other deployment method. Note that that should deploy this
into the same Resource Group that you deployed the Rancher Node ARM template
into. You will be prompted for the following info shown in the screenshot:
After the Rancher
Node and Rancher Host ARM templates are deployed you should see the following
resources in the new Resource Group:
Name
Type
RancherVNet
Virtual
network
RancherHost
Virtual
machine
RancherNode
Virtual
machine
RancherHostPublicIP
Public
IP address
RancherNodePublicIP
Public
IP address
RancherHostNic
Network
interface
RancherNodeNic
Network
interface
RancherHost_OSDisk
Disk
RancherNode_OSDisk
Disk
Next navigate the
Rancher portal in the web browser. The URL is the DNS name of the Rancher Node
VM. You can find the DNS name by clicking on the Rancher Node VM in the Azure
portal on the overview page. Here is an example of the URL:
The Rancher portal
will prompt you to set a password. This is shown in the following screenshot.
After setting the
password the Rancher portal will prompt you for the correct Rancher Server URL.
This will automatically be the Rancher Node VM DNS name. Click Save URL.
You will then be
logged into the Rancher portal. You will see the cluster page. From here you
will want to add a cluster. Doing this is how you add a new Kubernetes cluster
to Rancher. In this post I will show you how to add a cluster to the Rancher
Host VM. When it’s all said and done Rancher will have successfully deployed
Kubernetes to the Rancher Host VM. Note that you could add a managed Kubernetes
such as AKS but we won’t do that in this blog. I will save that for a future
blog post!
Click on Add Cluster
Under “From my
own existing nodes” Click on custom, give the cluster a name and click
Next.
Next check all the
boxes for the Node Options since all the roles will be on a single Kubernetes
cluster. Copy the code shown at the bottom of the page, click done and run the
code on the Rancher Host.
In order to run the
code on the Rancher Host you need to SSH in and run it from there. To do this
follow these steps:
In the Azure Portal, from within the resource group click on the Rancher Host VM.
On the Overview page click on Connect.
Copy “ssh ranchuser@rancherhost.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com” from the Connect to virtual machine pop up screen.
Open a terminal in either Azure cloud shell or with something like a terminal via VS Code and past the “ssh ranchuser@rancherhost.centralus.cloudapp.azure.com” in.
Running the code
will look like this:
When done you can
run Docker PS to see that the Rancher agent containers are running.
In the Rancher
portal under clusters you will see the Rancher host being provisioned
The status will
change as Kubernetes is deployed.
Once it’s done
provisioning you will see your Kubernetes cluster as Active.
From here you can
see a bunch of info about your new Kubernetes cluster. Also notice that you
could even launch Kubectl right from hereand start running commands! Take some
time to click around to see all the familiar stuff you are used to working with
in Kubernetes. This is pretty cool and simplifies the management experience for
Kubernetes.
If you want to add
more nodes or need the configuration code again just click the ellipsis button
and edit.
In Edit Cluster you
can change the cluster name, get and change settings and copy the code to add
more VMs to the cluster.
That’s the end of
this post. Thanks for reading. Check back for more Azure, Kubernetes, and
Rancher blog posts.
