I can’t begin to count the amount of times I screwed up a virtual machine that wouldn’t boot anymore. In most cases, that was due to messing up /etc/fstab, which controls which disks get mounted in Linux. If that file is broken, your machine won’t boot anymore. In Azure, there’s an ability to swap the […]
Category: Management

Execute arbitrary PowerShell or Azure CLI in an ARM template
ARM templates are a great way to deploy infrastructure to Azure. The issue however is that sometimes, you need to do something that is not supported in a template. Think about executing an Azure Function when the template completes, or updating a config file in blob storage / some table. There is a new preview […]

Accessing Key Vault Secrets in Kubernetes using the Key Vault CSI driver
Note: There’s a new post available combining CSI driver + AAD pod identity. When you store secrets in a Kubernetes cluster, by default those are stored in the etcd database within the master nodes. The same is true for secrets stored in an AKS cluster on Azure. The best practice for storing secrets is to […]

Using Azure Resource Graph to optimize your scripts
I had to get some data out of a large Azure environment yesterday. What I needed was a quick way to get all machines of a certain size. Typically, I would have used Azure Powershell or Azure CLI to get this done. Create a loop over all resource groups, get all the resources in the […]

Tag resources created by a Databricks cluster
A lot of organizations rely on tags for organizing Azure resources. Tags are useful to contain metadata about owners, environment, function and are also very useful to keep track of costs. When you create an Azure Databricks cluster, the service will create a managed resource group on your behalf. This managed resource group has a […]