I’m a big fan of the new static web hosting feature of Azure Storage, it makes hosting static websites a breeze and brings the costs down to pennies. I have been quick to recommend using this approach until Barry Dorrans highlighted to me that you cannot set headers using this service, more specifically he wanted to set a number of security headers.

You want to experiment with Azure Kubernetes service (AKS) but don’t want the expense of cluster(s) running 24/7, however you also don’t have time to wait for the 10-15mins it usually takes to create a new cluster from scratch? Instead of creating a cluster everytime you need one and then deleting it again, you can provision a cluster once and then use the built-in features of Azure VMs to automatically shut down the cluster nodes on a schedule thereby reducing the costs of running a cluster to close to zero.

Without needing to install any 3rd party tools you can create and edit screen recordings in a few simple steps. I recently starting speaking at local usergroups and conferences and wanted to record videos of some of my demos as a back up. I know there are very popular and fully featured tools such as Camtasia but I just wanted some basic screen recording and didn’t want to have to buy and learn a new tool for such a basic requirement.

UPDATE: This trick is deprecated in Kubernetes CLI 1.18 onwards. When you’re new to Kubernetes creating the Kubernetes configuration files starting with a blank editor window can be quite daunting. One option is to copy an existing file from somewhere and editing it but this can be problematic as there may be alot of noise or perhaps old API versions neither of which are helpful when you’re just starting out.

….by keeping the state outside of your cluster This is the first in a series of posts about the Open Service Broker API and how it can used to provision services external to your cluster as part of your Kubernetes deployments. Although not strictly necessary for this post, if you are new to Kubernetes I would recommend reading up on the basics, the Kubernetes documentation is a good place to start.

This is a quick post to try and help anyone else who runs into an issue with Minikube on Windows suddenly not responding to commands. The solution is actually quite straightforward and in fact in the documentation (I did RTFM and had previously recreated the hyper-v switch which solved the issue for a little while)

I ran into an issue working on an OpenId Connect (OIDC) project recently and it turned out to be due to my usage rather than a bug, however I don’t think it was obvious what I was doing wrong. Once I found out the answer I wanted to use this blog post to record it here in case I run into it again in future and if it helps someone else then that’s great too.

To paraphrase Marc Andreessen, Kubernetes is eating the world. Microsoft today (24th October 2017) announced the public preview of the AKS, a fully managed Kubernetes Service running on Azure. TL;DR AKS is to Azure what GKE is to Google Cloud Platform. Kubernetes on Azure Sure you’ve been able to run Kubernetes on Azure for a while, so why AKS and how does it differentiate itself from the other solutions on Azure?

If you’re experimenting with Windows containers and want a super quick way to get started with running the containers you can’t get anything easier than Azure Container Instances (ACI). At MS Ignite 2017 Microsoft officially announced you can now run Windows containers on Azure Container Instances (it is still in preview though).

I attended my first Container Camp last week and wanted to share my experience. This is part 1 talking about the workshop day, check out part 2 (coming soon) for the main conference itself. Before I go any further I think it’s useful to mention my technical background because most conference crowds will often polarise towards a particular ecosystem/platform (that’s kind of obvious right!