How to Secure Your Terraform State File in Azure

Terraform has become the standard for managing cloud infrastructure, and with good reason. It provides consistent, repeatable deployments and integrates with almost every cloud provider. But there’s one piece that’s often overlooked until it causes problems: the Terraform state file.  Your terraform.tfstate file is more than just metadata — it’s the single source of truthContinueContinue reading “How to Secure Your Terraform State File in Azure”

Validating Azure APIM in CI: A Practical Approach to Safe API Deployments

When deploying any code you want to validate it as much as you can before deploying. However with APIs in the APIM you can’t validate the XML Policy or the API logic until it is deployed into the API Management Service (APIM). This means you are limited to the options to validate the code, beforeContinueContinue reading “Validating Azure APIM in CI: A Practical Approach to Safe API Deployments”

Progressive Learning in Coding: The Elevator Approach

Learning new skills can be hard and when working with complex technology like coding it can be confusing. Over the years as I have learnt more technologies, I have found an approach that has helped keep learning simple. This is something I was taught before when I first started and continue to pass on toContinueContinue reading “Progressive Learning in Coding: The Elevator Approach”

Automating Azure PIM Requests with PowerShell

Privileged Identity Management (PIM) is made to be a secure authentication method to assign user permissions via groups and monitor the access.  This enables short time requests for the permissions that can require fields like reason for access, how long to have access and who is having access. This can typically be used for engineers’ContinueContinue reading “Automating Azure PIM Requests with PowerShell”

Azure DevOps REST API: Add Users and Set Administrators Easily

When using the Azure DevOps REST API to create Teams and add users, you may want to set the administrators as well at the same time. However, this REST API is not well documented on the Microsoft documentation site for the REST API. With some searching and mapping of resources, I have below the methodContinueContinue reading “Azure DevOps REST API: Add Users and Set Administrators Easily”

Download files and folders from Azure DevOps 

If you have a large repository it can be a long wait on the pipeline to get it checked out, only to use a few files. In this post, I will guide you through using PowerShell to download only the files you need with either the Azure DevOps REST API or CLI.  API Service  InContinueContinue reading “Download files and folders from Azure DevOps “

Automating SemVer Versioning

Application versioning is a key principle in the DevOps lifecycle, this is to ensure both users and software providers can easily tack any changes made to the application or environment, we therefore want to ensure that any manual process of updating versions is replaced with an automated process. In this post, I will go throughContinueContinue reading “Automating SemVer Versioning”

Octopus Deploy Runbook cloning with the REST API

Ever wondered how you can copy an Octopus Deploy Runbook from one Project to another? It can’t be done, well at least by using the User Interface. What you can do is use code, so by using the power of the Octopus REST API and some PowerShell we can make it possible. In this post,ContinueContinue reading “Octopus Deploy Runbook cloning with the REST API”