I recently wrote about the importance of protecting your Terraform state files and the Azure Storage accounts that hold them. One of the recurring challenges in real-world environments is striking the right balance between security and operability — specifically, how do we fully lock down a storage account to prevent public access, while still allowing … Read more
Learn how to secure Terraform state in Azure using Entra ID, RBAC, private storage, and ephemeral resources to prevent secrets leaking.
In the previous posts in this series, I’ve highlighted the benefits of using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and more specifically integrating Terraform with DevOps CI/CD pipelines and optimising pipelines with pull requests and automatic tagging. As we’ve seen, using IaC is a reliable way to deploy and manage resources in Azure, giving us consistency, repeatability, … Read more
Building on last week’s foundation, learn how to harden your Azure DevOps pipelines with branch policies, automated pull request validation, OIDC authentication, and security checks using Checkov
With OIDC, Stage Gates & Reusable Templates When you’re deploying infrastructure at scale, Azure DevOps Terraform pipelines need to be more than just a “plan and apply” script. They need to be safe, reusable, secure, and structured enough to support multiple teams and multiple environments. In this post, I’ll walk through a production-grade Azure DevOps … Read more
The shift to the cloud isn’t just a technology or platform shift, it’s a whole new mindset. “We migrated 200 servers to Azure in six months. The technical migration was a success. Yet twelve months later, teams were still operating like it was 2010, costs were spiralling, and we hadn’t delivered any of the promised … Read more
Building your Azure Data Center Foundation Traditional on-premises data centers are constrained by physical reality-limited space, aging hardware, and long provisioning cycles that drag through change management, multiple teams, and competing priorities across servers, applications, networks, and security. Scaling means racking, stacking, cabling, and hoping there’s still room in the hall. A modern Azure data … Read more
The Problem I found myself committing a cardinal sin in Terraform — repeating configuration across multiple projects. When deploying Azure resources, we often need region- or environment-specific values. For example, virtual networks may need different routes or DNS servers depending on the location. I was managing these using lookup tables in local variables, like this: … Read more
“If you can define your entire infrastructure in code, enforce policy globally, and scale on demand – do you still have a datacenter, or do you have a platform?” This question gets to the heart of why Azure as a data center represents a fundamental shift. It’s not just a place to run VMs—it’s a … Read more
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is one of those topics that sounds straightforward in theory but quickly becomes complicated in practice. The perils of too much choice certainly hit home when we talk about IaC and Azure. Walk into any organisation and you’ll find multiple teams, each with their own views on the “right” IaC choice. … Read more