GitHub Actions: 0–100 in 60 minutes
I recently had the privilege of presenting an introduction to GitHub Actions at the New Zealand GitHub User Group. The recording of the session is available on YouTube.
Use a Parameter to Assign User Assigned Managed Identities to Resources with Bicep
Isn’t that title a mouthful.
Coming from Terraform, there are somethings that seem strange in Bicep.
One of those is the way that the Resource Manager API handles assigning User Assigned Managed Identities (UAMIs).
If you look at the API documentation for a resource
(in this case we are going to use an Event Hub Namespace, but this applies to all resources that can have a UAMI assigned)
you will see that the userAssignedIdentities value of the identity property looks lkie this:
Access Terraform Private Modules in GitHub Actions
In a recent project we used GitHub Actions to deploy our Terraform code. While not the best way to deploy Terraform, we had it working nicely.
One of the biggest challenges we encountered was how to download the private Terraform modules we had created. In a GitHub Actions workflow you can specify the permissions that the runner should be granted. However, these permissions are scoped to the repository that the Action is running on, and it is not possible to add additional repos to the permission set.
Automatic Virtual Network CIDR Assignments with Azure IPAM and Bicep
Recently Microsoft announced a public preview of native IP Address Management in Azure, powered by Virtual Network Manager. Being new technology, and with a new landing zone to build, I decided to test and see if we could use it to make IP management simpler.
The starting point was to completely miss the documentation and try and work it out myself. Sadly, the API documentation has yet to be updated to cover the new properties, and tracing the portal requests didn’t help either, since it uses a slightly different flow (sigh!).
Self-Hosted GitHub Runners FOR FREE!
I recently had the privilege of opening the New Zealand GitHub User Group with a presentation on using Azure Container Apps for self-hosted GitHub Actions Runners. The recording of the session is available on YouTube.
Deploy a Flex Consumption Function App with Terraform
In May 2024 Microsoft released the Public Preview of the new Flex Consumption Azure Functions. This is an exciting release, primarily because it finally allows a consumption Function App to be VNet integrated. Before the release of Flex Consumption Function Apps, we had to either decide to use a consumption plan or allow access to internal resources (and pay 24/7 for the privilege). While there have been workarounds (e.g. run a Function App in Container Apps) none were ideal.
Ansible, Python, PEP668, and Virtual Environments
Have you ever had one of those days where your troubleshooting resembles doing the foxtrot? Forward. Sideways. Backwards. Round in Circles. I had one of those last week.
My current customer is using Ansible for orchestration. As part of proving out the capabilities, and working through the best way to make it all work, I needed to set up my local environment.
Running macOS typically makes setup a breeze. Thanks to the wonderful Homebrew Pacakge Manager. Tools such as Ansible and Ansible Lint are just a brew install away.