Mark Wragg

DevOps Engineer and PowerShell fanatic. IT Contractor / Consultant. Director @ MPFE Consultancy Ltd.

Recent Posts

Automating SSL certificate renewal in Azure

4 minute read

The maximum valid lifetime of SSL certificates is being significantly reduced over the next few years, so there’s never been a better time to automate your certificate management. In Azure SSL certificates can be used in lots of different places, some of which are easier to manage than others, and you may already have a degree of automation in place. But by 2029 SSL certificates will have a maximum lifetime of 47 days, so automation will be essential to ensure you can continue to keep services running without disruption, and without significant overhead on the team or teams that manage and ...

Learning Python via PowerShell

17 minute read

PowerShell and Python are powerful programming languages with many similarities. While PowerShell is technically a shell scripting language (like Bash), functionally it has a lot more in common with Python, and can be used to generate scripts of equal complexity. As someone with a strong familiarity with PowerShell, I’m finding it useful as I learn Python to reference the equivalent concepts in PowerShell.

Well-architect your Azure Terraform with PSRule

11 minute read

This blog post is part of the Azure Spring Clean 2025 community event, promoting well-managed Azure tenants. In last year’s Azure Spring Clean, Dan Rios blogged about using PSRule for Bicep code. The focus of this blog post is on how you can use PSRule to validate Azure resources deployed via Terraform by HashiCorp.

How I became a (PowerShell) millionaire

14 minute read

There was a recent trend on Twitter/X where people were sharing whether they spent more time tweeting or coding, which you can discover for yourself through this tool. Apparently I spent 61% more time tweeting than coding (in public anyway), and while I was pondering whether or not that was a good thing, Doug Finke came to this excellent conclusion:

Converting Azure DevOps Classic Release deployment pipelines to YAML

16 minute read

I recently migrated some Azure DevOps Classic Release deployment pipelines to YAML. There’s obvious benefits to storing your pipelines as code: they become an artifact in source control that can evolve and change as the code they build or deploy does, and you have the benefits of version history and maintaining the pipelines via pull requests. However I also found that I could use logic and expressions to make the pipelines more efficient and easier to maintain and that through templating could easily connect the pipelines together to form what I humorously dubbed the “super pipeline” (but ...

Monitor and manage your Azure cloud costs with a little help from PowerShell

13 minute read

Should cloud computing be illegal? Probably not, but it is incredibly easy to get started, equally difficult to stop, and before you know it you could be selling your grandmother just to afford one more month of that delicious compute. Hopefully your circumstances never get that dire, but I’ve seen plenty of companies entrench themselves into the highly addictive world of automated, scalable infrastructure, but then struggle to understand the often-astronomical monthly bill.

Perform Currency Conversions with PowerShell

7 minute read

I’ve recently been working on a PowerShell module for exploring Azure costs and while doing so added some functionality to allow the costs to be converted between different currencies. It occurred to me that this functionality would be useful as a module of its own, and when I searched around I didn’t find too many recent examples for the same. As such I’ve now developed and published a module in the PowerShell Gallery and on GitHub called CurrencyConverter.