Azure Kubernetes Service

In this article, I’m going to show you how to deploy an AKS Automatic Cluster within your own custom virtual network using Bicep. An Azure Subscription A code editor - I’m using Visual Studio Code! The AZ CLI kubectl A bash shell (VS Code has an integrated terminal, Windows terminal is also pretty neat) If you don’t know what AKS Automatic is, we’ll cover that before we start. We’ll then work through the Bicep code that we need to provision a cluster with our own virtual network. ...

In this article, I’m going to show you how to build an Azure Kubernetes Service lab environment with Bicep. This sample was inspired by this AKS Lab provided by the AKS team! [!NOTE] If you want to see a live demo of this instead, check it out on my YouTube channel! We’re going to build the lab environment step by step using Bicep. Wherever possible, we will avoid creating resources using the AZ CLI, and instead take an opinionated approach to defining our infrastructure declaratively with Bicep instead. We will still need to use the AZ CLI to do some tasks, such as deploying our resources. ...

As part of my AKS lab, I wanted to see how I can enforce compliance on workloads and my AKS control plane so I get into the habit of creating secure and compliant sandbox environments. We can achieve this with Azure Policy! So in this article, I’ll cover: What Azure Policy is. How it integrates with Azure Kubernetes Service. How we can enable Azure Policy for our AKS cluster with Terraform How we can apply and test policies to our AKS Cluster How we can check the overall compliance state for our cluster in the Azure Portal. What is Azure Policy? Azure Policy allows us to manage the state of compliance of our Azure services. It compares the state of your resources to the business rules that you define in Azure Policy. This can include enforcing resource tags on your resources, limiting the types of services you can use in Azure and where you can deploy them. ...

As part of the AKS cluster that I’m building for my personal development, I decided it be worthwhile installing the Dapr extension on my cluster. AKS extensions provide an Azure Resource Manager driven experience for installing and managing different services like Dapr on your cluster. Since I built my cluster using Terraform, I decided to configure the Dapr extension using Terraform as well. In this article, I’ll talk about how we can configure our AKS cluster so that we can install extensions on it, How the Dapr cluster extension works, and then I’ll explain how we can configure our Dapr extension in Terraform. ...

I’m building my own Azure Kubernetes Cluster that I can use for my personal development, and I’ve been wanting to improve my Terraform skills, so I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of days getting a Terraform deployment to work with GitHub Actions. The AzureRM provider has moved on a bit since I’ve used it in anger, so I learnt a lot about the different resources that are available, and how we can use GitHub Actions to deploy Terraform templates to Azure. ...