Steven Murawski on Infrastructure as Code - Episode 004

Welcome to the 4th episode of the Azure DevOps podcast! Today, Jeffrey Palermo is joined by special guest, Steven Murawski. Steven is the Lead Cloud Ops Advocate at Microsoft and leads the Cloud Ops Advocacy team focused on DevOps SRE and Cloud Native scenarios with Azure. He is an active member of the Chef and WinOps communities and a maintainer for several open source projects including Chef, Habitat, and Test-Kitchen. Steve focuses specifically on infrastructure within Azure DevOps.

This episode, Steven Murawski explains the basics of infrastructure, which tools and infrastructures he recommends for those putting together their DevOps tool belt, the value in defining your infrastructure as code, where to get started and how to modify your infrastructure on the fly, and how to minimize your opportunities for failure.

Topics of Discussion:

[:51] About today's topic and guest.

[1:31] What is Steve currently up to in regards to work?

[4:49] The basics of infrastructure.

[8:11] As people are putting together their DevOps tool belt, which tools and infrastructures does Steve recommend for the Microsoft shops?

[9:21] Steve explains what Terraform is and what you can do with it.

[11:35] How Steve sees the value in defining their infrastructure as code.

[13:31] Where to get started in this "infrastructure as code" world (and modifying your infrastructure on the fly.)

[18:07] A word from Azure DevOps sponsor: Clear Measure.

[18:33] Steve speaks about tweaking infrastructure, minimizing opportunities for failure, and applying testing principles to the infrastructure's code.

[20:00] What format do these tests live in and where are they running from?

[23:55] At what level of granularity do you break up the ARM files?

[28:45] Once an application has been running for a while, what does the path look like to change something that's already there when you don't want to start completely fresh?

[31:20] When do you release a new build?

[33:47] Do you push a new release through the release part of the Pipelines with an existing build?

[36:55] Steve speaks about the Chef and WinOps communities he is a part of, as well as the open source projects he helps maintain.

[44:41] Where to get started with infrastructure as code.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Chef

WinOps

Habitat

Test-Kitchen

ARM Templates

Terraform
Azure DevOps Portal

Visual Studio Code

JSON

GitHub

Azure QuickStarts on GitHub

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

InSpec for Chef

Pester

Azure Powershell

Azure CLI

Working Effectively with Legacy Code, by Michael Feathers

Puppet

Donovan Brown's project: yoTeam

Stack Overflow

Want to Learn More?

Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Follow Up with Our Guest:

Steven Murawski's Website

Steven Murawski's LinkedIn