Mark Wragg

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.

Charting Azure Application Gateway Logs by Response Code

1 minute read

I recently implemented a new Azure Application Gateway and was interested to chart the connections through it per hour, grouped by HTTP Response Code. My initial attempt was this query:

Changelog Driven Deployments

3 minute read

A changelog is a useful addition to any project, as it provides users and contributors with a summary of notable changes between each release. One way to ensure you always update your changelog as part of any new release is by making it part of the the automated deployment process. This blog post describes how I’ve implemented changelog driven deployments for the PowerShell modules I maintain in GitHub.

ARM Deployment “JToken type is not valid” error

1 minute read

I have recently added tasks in to our Azure DevOps ARM template deployment pipeline to run the new -WhatIf parameter on the New-AzResourceGroupDeployment to preview the changes an ARM deployment will make, per this guide:

ARM deployment error Operation PutLoadBalancerOperation was canceled

1 minute read

Last week I spent a day troubleshooting an ARM (Azure Resource Manager) template deployment error that was frustratingly vague. A Load Balancer resource in the template was returning a result of “conflict” and the following error:

Deploying Influx and Grafana on Windows with Terraform

11 minute read

I have previously blogged about how you can use Influx, Grafana and PowerShell to build and populate metrics dashboards for visualising data from multiple sources. This blog post details how you can use Terraform to quickly and easily deploy Grafana and Influx on a Windows instance in AWS as a proof of concept implementation of these tools.

Recent Posts