Azure

Over the weekend, I was on a quest to find the cheapest available Azure Virtual Machine to house my Azure Kubernetes Service cluster. I previously wrote about optimizing storage cost with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), where I talk about the importance of selecting VMs that support ephemeral OS disks. But what VM type and region should I choose? Searching through reservation offers in the Azure Portal turned out to be tedious. This time, I’ll demonstrate how to find the best offers using PowerShell and export the results to a CSV file.

One aspect of managing Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is keeping it up-to-date. One strategy is periodically building a “golden” image and re-deploying AVD session host VMs using the updated image. In this post, we’ll use Packer and GitHub Actions to build a Windows 11 image and push it to Azure.

With Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), you can deliver secure Windows 11 desktops and environments anywhere. It’s pretty easy to deploy and scale. You can provide a coherent user experience from any end-user device and reduce costs by leveraging Windows 11 multi-session licensing. This tutorial will guide you through setting up AVD with AADDS using Terraform.

I wanted to revisit this topic for a while because the previous guide I wrote about setting up Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS) with Terraform is outdated. However, the article still attracts around 100 visitors per month. People also keep downloading the deprecated Terraform module I created. Time to set things right!

I use the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to host a few services, like Synapse, Remark42, and Plausible Analytics. As of yet, none of these services require much computing power, so I chose a small VM size for the AKS node: Standard_B2ms. I recently analyzed my Azure costs and found out that I could have saved more than a hundred bucks in the past months if I had been more diligent.

Update 2022-02-20#

This guide is outdated! Please click here to go to the new guide I wrote.

Did you ever think about running a Matrix homeserver? In this post, we will set one up on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). We will use the reference homeserver implementation, which is Synapse from the folks at matrix.org. This post focuses on the Kubernetes stuff, keeping Synapse configuration to a minimum. Things like federation, delegation and PostgreSQL are out of scope, because plenty of excellent guides and the official documentation exist covering that. The icing on the cake will be the Synapse Admin UI deployment with secure access to the administration endpoints to make management of our homeserver easier.

Building upon our previous work, we will deploy Remark42 on Kubernetes with Terraform and integrate it with your existing Hugo website. Make sure to check out my previous posts about creating a Hugo Website and deploying an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster if you haven’t already.

In this post, we will deploy a simple Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster from scratch. To expose our web services securely, we will install Traefik 2 and configure cert-manager to manage Let’s Encrypt certificates. The best part about it: we will do everything with Terraform.