Docker Desktop Alternatives for macOS

After the news earlier this week that Docker will be introducing charges to the Docker Subscription Service Agreement, as detailed in the Tweet below: We're updating and extending our product subscriptions! New subscription tiers include Personal, Pro, Team, and Business. Details here: https://t.co/pyDetDKGjC #Docker #Subscriptions pic.twitter.com/Or8l6YoIUO — Docker Build Cloud is here! 🐳🧱☁️ (@Docker) August 31, 2021 I started to think about looking at alternatives, while I use Docker Desktop I did not use it enough to warrant looking at one of the new subscriptions....

September 5, 2021 · 12 min · Russ McKendrick

Some Terraform Azure Notes

I have just finished working on a few large Terraform Azure deployments, thought I would stick a few notes down in a blog post so that I can refer to them in the future as well as hopefully being useful to others. Azure Diagnostic Settings While the azurerm_monitor_diagnostic_setting resource can be used to apply diagnostic settings to pretty much any other resource, however, as each resource has different logs and metrics figuring them out can be a chore....

August 30, 2021 · 6 min · Russ McKendrick

Rocky Linux and Packer

It has been a while since I last looked at running Packer external link locally, when I did CentOS 8 had just been released. Since then, there has been a little drama around the on-going support of CentOS which is best summed up by the following post in /r/sysadmin/ external link : Off the back of this announcement the Rocky Linux project external link has been announced, developed and then released. The project describes itself as follows:...

August 28, 2021 · 4 min · Russ McKendrick

Tracking costs in Terraform using Infracost

In my last blog post I introduced a stage which executed Checkov external link to my Terraform Azure DevOps pipeline, this scanned the Terraform configuration and stopped the deployment if there was an issue. I also added a stage which checks to see if there are any resources being destroyed. Whats missing? Both of these I thought should give some basic protection against problems caused by common configuration issues, which they did, but it didn’t take into account the end user, i....

August 24, 2021 · 14 min · Russ McKendrick

Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline with Checkov & Approvals

It’s been just over a year since I first posted about the Azure DevOps Terraform Pipeline I used to use external link , I say used to use, because that pipeline is now a little outdated. This posts covers the updated Pipeline I am starting to deploy along side my Terraform code. Pipeline Overview The pipeline itself has expanded a little and it now not only uses stages but also depending what Terraform is planning on doing it will trigger a manual approval process should there be any resources being destroyed....

June 8, 2021 · 13 min · Russ Mckendrick

Azure DevOps Multi-Stage Pipelines

As I move into using Azure DevOps more and more, there is one thing which I really haven’t got on with and that is release pipelines. I didn’t like that I couldn’t easily define it as YAML like I could with build pipelines, even though I don’t like them, there are a few things I do like — like approval gates. Environments Luckily, there are ways to get around this — the most simple way is to add an Environment and then add an Approval....

April 25, 2021 · 7 min · Russ Mckendrick

Top 20ish Records of 2020

A little late, but there are my top 20 records of 2020, as per previous years these are all ones which I have purchased on vinyl. bdrmm ‎- Bedroom external link Doves ‎- The Universal Want external link Pure Reason Revolution — Eupnea external link Orb — Abolition Of The Royal Familia external link The Smashing Pumpkins — Cyr external link Andy Bell — The View From Halfway Down external link Ulver — Flowers Of Evil external link Church Of The Cosmic Skull — Everybodys Going To Die external link Jim Bob — Pop Up Jim Bob external link Matt Berry — Phantom Bird external link Working Mens Club — Working Mens Club external link Crippled Black Phoenix — Ellengast external link Bruce Springsteen — Letter To You external link And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead — X: The Godless Void And Othe Stories external link The Pineapple Thief — Versions Of The Truth external link Ozric Tentacles — Space For The Earth external link Abel Ganz — The Life Of The Honeybee Other Moments Of Clarity external link Sparks — A Steady Drip Drip Drip external link EOB — Earth external link Badly Drawn Boy — Banana Skin Shoes external link Katatonia — City Burials external link Kavus Torabi — Hip To The Jag external link

January 22, 2021 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

Managing Python on macOS Big Sur

When Apple releases a new version of macOS it always takes a few months for everything to catchup, following my last blog post where I mentioned that I was having problems installing Python on macOS Big Sur external link which meant that my preferred method of installing and managing Python using pyenv, which is documented in this blog post external link , didn’t work out of the box — and the workarounds suggested workarounds on GitHub made my shell really slow....

January 10, 2021 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick