I recently purchased an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2021) laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HS processor and RTX 3070 GPU. I really enjoy the light weight, relatively diminutive size and curiously long battery life of this machine which also packs a performance punch when needed. However, one thing I was not prepared for was Asus and their lackluster firmware/drivers/etc. for basic things like the keyboard. I don’t want to turn this into a long post because if you show up on this page you are probably just looking for the fix. So to keep it short… (more…)
My work frequently involves using remote, ephemeral, containers to run scripts/code/whatever for DevOps type automation. Typically these containers are running some flavor of Linux. My work also frequently involves designing these automations for Azure and using Terraform for IaC. On occasion though, I find the need to drop out of “declarative” mode and utilize scripted imperative actions to make dynamic changes at run time. I frequently lean on either using the remote-exec provisioner with a null resource -or- if I really need my script to run during the Terraform plan phase, I will use the special external data source.
All that said, this article isn’t really focused on Terraform per se’ or the usage of those methods. Perhaps at some point in the future I will have an opportunity to do some write-ups on the topic of using run-time scripts. Rather, this is much more narrowly focused on how to interact and affect changes in Azure using the ARM API using commonly available tools on most runners like BASH and CURL. (more…)
Working with Terraform to build VM’s in Azure for proof-of-concept work, I often opt to use Ubuntu for my Linux systems. Up until 18.04 everything worked fine but when I tried to go to 20.04 or later my Terraform deployment would error out with:
Failure sending request: StatusCode=404 -- Original Error: Code="PlatformImageNotFound" Message="The platform image 'Canonical:UbuntuServer:20.04-lts:latest' is not available. Verify that all fields in the storage profile are correct.
Did Microsoft suddenly fall behind the curve with available OS images for one of the world’s most popular operating systems?
Thankfully, no. The answer is actually pretty simple… they just started breaking out different versions of the popular operating systems under different ‘offer’ families and your Terraform code needs to reflect as much.
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If you thought the title of this article was just a bunch of mental word vomit, well, it kind of is. But the words all have meaning and I wanted to quickly talk about a key issue that I have continued to come across in my journey with Terraform… namely, getting things to apply consistently and successfully – particularly when introducing things to make end-use of your custom modules easier and your code more succinct and versatile – like conditionals and meta arguments such as “count” and “for_each”. (more…)