Azure VM marked for deletion

The other day I was building out two Virtual Machines using an ARM template. I had been building many other VMs with no issues. Now, I have a failure. And two other VMs had issues being created. All four VMs had a Provision Status of Failed. I checked the quota and determined that was not the issue. Looking at the failure message of each VM only said a failure occurred and provided no real details.

Using Pulumi to create Azure Virtual Network

This code segment is to create a virtual network in Azure. It's assumed you already have Pulumi installed and connected to Azure. To start, you do need to know what Resource Group you want to house the virtual network (vnet). And, you need to know what address space you want to use and any subnets. You need at least one subnet for resources that need an IP address. We'll start with a blank MyStack class. I create other classes for the resources so I don't have every network piece, VMs, storage accounts, etc all in the case class. I like the segregation.

Terraform + Azure Availability Zones

While learning Terraform some time back, I wanted to leverage Availability Zones in Azure. I was specifically looking at Virtual Machine Scale Sets. https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/azurerm/r/virtual_machine_scale_set.html Looking at the documentation Terraform has, I noticed there is no good example on using zones. So, I tried a few things to see what was really needed for that field. While doing some research, I noticed there are many people in the same situation. No good examples. I figured I'd create this post to help anyone else. And, of course, it's a good reminder for me too if I forget the syntax on how I did this.

Removing an Azure Application Gateway

While working with Terraform scripts I created many Azure Application Gateways. Sometime after they were created I would delete them as they were only needed to prove my scripts were working with Azure DevOps. I was using Terraform functions and special *magic* to get things just right. Then I noticed one of my App Gateways refused to delete.

Azure Cosmos DB Replication

While learning about Cosmos DB I had a lot of misunderstandings around consistency levels. And, it's not surprising. Many people, certainly those coming from a SQL Server background like I did, have these misunderstandings. But, before I can jump into Cosmos DB consistency levels (covered in another post) I have to cover replication. This post is about the intricate details of replication that I had to wrap my head around for consistency levels to make sense. Although learning consistency levels does not require understanding replication first, it was helpful for me when developing use case scenarios.

Speaker Confession

@geekygirlsarah helped start a trend called #speakerconfessions. I just submitted mine. In 2016 at Tulsa TechFest I gave two talks back to back right after lunch. I was congested at lunch so I took an antihistamine and drank a bottle of water. During my talks I always drink water. So,during my first talk I drank another bottle of water. Then, in between sessions, I went to the bathroom. Well, 20 minutes into my 2nd talk I had to leave to pee again!

Tulsa TechFest 2016

Had a great time at Tulsa TechFest 2016 this year. I gave two talks "Converting Crap Code to a Better Design" and "A Look at the Plug-In Architecture";  I had over 40 people in the converting crap code session. We went further than I planned and went into the next phase of the project and talked about plug-ins. So, on the plug-in talk I only had about 20 people. That's OK. In the plug-in talk I showed "Poor Man's IoC" and MEF to find classes that implement a specific interface. Then I showed a very brief example of Autofac using dotnetfiddle.

Hello world!

Finally!!  I reinstalled wordpress and got the blog going again. Admittedly, I don't blog much. But, now it's (past) time to blog.