Last week I published a new course on Pluralsight. This one is a milestone as it marks my 20th course! This course is titled “Getting Started with Drupal“. Startups, enterprises and more continue to adopt content management systems at a fast rate with Drupal being one of the top Content Management Systems used.
Drupal is one of the top choices for startups and enterprises. It is used for many uses from web apps, marketing tools, e-commerce, and even a company’s main website.
I have been working with Drupal and other content management systems in various aspects for over sixteen years. I have used Drupal for my own websites, hosted it for businesses, administered Drupal sites for customers, Drupal development for customers, and even managed the development of Drupal modules. With all of my history with Drupal, I was excited when the opportunity came up to build a course about it.
This course is ideal for bloggers, entrepreneurs, Product Managers, Marketing managers, Marketing executives, Marketing consultants, Marketing employees, web developers, project managers, business analysts, web designers, graphic designers, UX/UI, designers, and anyone interested in content management systems specifically Drupal.
This course will take you from little to no knowledge of Drupal to a place where you can be confident enough to get started. Whether you want to create a personal blog, a business website, or an online store, Drupal is a skill you should have and this course has you covered.
In this course,Getting Started with Drupal, you’ll learn its many uses, features, tech stack, and you’ll also explore hosting it. Next, you’ll learn how to install it. Finally, you’ll discover its user interface and general configuration.
Some of the major topics that are covered in this course include:
Core Drupal knowledge.
About its tech stack such as web servers like Apache, language PHP, Composer, Drush, & databases like MySQL & how these work with Drupal.
How to acquire a domain & hosting for Drupal.
& Finally, how to install and configure Drupal.
By the end of this course, you will have a better understanding of content management systems, & Drupal itself, its uses, features, & tech stack. As well as knowledge of how to get a domain name, hosting, and install Drupal along with a tour of its interface and general configuration.
This course is the 1st in a Drupal Path named “Drupal Fundamentals” on Pluralsight. The 2nd course in the path is “Drupal 10 Site Administration”. You can check out the full path here:
I hope you find value in this new Getting Started with Drupal course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses!
Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow me:
I am excited to kick off the new year announcing that my 8th book has been published! This book is “Azure Arc-Enabled Kubernetes and Servers“.
I had the honor to co-author this book with a long-time friend and fellow Microsoft MVP John Joyner. This is John’s latest book since his last 8 years ago!
The forward was written by Thomas Maurer a former MVP and now Microsoft Azure Evangelist. This book was reviewed by fellow Microsoft MVP Adnan Hendricks and a chapter contributed by a buddy of mine Fred Limmer.
This book covers an exciting technology from Microsoft exploring Azure Arc-Enabled Kubernetes and Servers. This book is for DevOps professionals, system administrators, security professionals, cloud admins, and IT professionals that are responsible for servers or Kubernetes clusters both on-premises and in the cloud.
Author copies!
This book covers:
Introduces the basics of hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge computing and how Azure Arc fits into that IT strategy
Teaches the fundamentals of Azure Resource Manager, setting the reader up with the knowledge needed on the technology that underpins Azure Arc
Offers insights into Azure native management tooling for managing on-premises servers and extending to other clouds
Details an end-to-end hybrid server monitoring scenario leveraging Azure Monitor and/or Azure Sentinel that is seamlessly delivered by Azure Arc
Defines a blueprint to achieve regulatory compliance with industry standards using Azure Arc, delivering Azure Policy from Azure Defender for Servers
Explores how Git and GitHub integrate with Azure Arc; delves into how GitOps is used with Azure Arc
Empowers your DevOps teams to perform tasks that typically fall under IT operations
Dives into how to best use Azure CLI with Azure Arc
You can order the book and watch for its official release here:
I am also happy to announce that I was a tech reviewer on the first study guide for this cert titled “HashiCorp Terraform Certified Associate PreparationGuide“. You can find it here: https://leanpub.com/terraform-certified/. This guide was authored by fellow Microsoft MVP Ned Bellavance and Microsoft CSA Adin Ermie. Huge thanks guys for letting me be a part of this project!
If you work with Terraform I hope you get certified and be sure to use the study guide!
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.
