Matt Allford
Technologist and Content Creator
Launceston, Australia
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Matt is a technologist and content creator with over 15 years of experience across infrastructure, development, and operations.
With a passion for education and content creation, he has authored courses at Pluralsight and presented at conferences across Australia and America, sharing his expertise in DevOps, Platform Engineering, and cloud technologies.
Among other roles, he has worked as a Developer Advocate, Technical Success Manager, and DevOps Engineer, helping customers realize value from modern deployment automation and cloud-native technology.
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Using PSRule to Test your Azure Infrastructure as Code
I think it's fair to say that if you've written some Infrastructure as Code (IAC), then you're likely aware you should be testing that IaC before you merge it in to your main branches, and use it to deploy infrastructure and environments. But what are you looking to achieve in your tests? What are you meant to be testing against? What tools can you use to perform the testing? How do you get started?
In this session, I want to show you how you can use start shifting left with your IaC testing by using PSRule, and specifically focusing on PSRule for Azure. PSRule for Azure contains a pre-built set of tests which follow principals of the Well-Architected Framework, and these tests allow you to check your ARM and Bicep templates before or after deployment to Azure. You can also use the framework to create your own custom rules using YAML, JSON, or PowerShell.
If you're working with ARM or Bicep IaC templates and you want to ensure your templates are being tested, starting with over 340 pre-built rules to test Azure resources, then join me in this session and I'll introduce you to PSRule for Azure to get you started.
Managing Secrets Safely with PowerShell
I think you and I both know that it's a bad idea to store any sort of credentials or secrets in plain text, such as in configuration files or code.
With PowerShell, we've had various ways to store credentials, typically by saving the credential as an encrypted xml file on the file system, or using a similar method.
In 2021, Microsoft released a new PowerShell module that abstracts secret management into consistent cmdlets, and lets you use these same cmdlets across different secret vault providers.
Grab your favorite festive beverage and join me for a few minutes, as I'd love to introduce you to these cmdlets, and hopefully you can go forward in to 2022 with some great use cases for leveraging the new SecretManagement PowerShell module.
PowerShell in Azure for the IT Pro
I have a long-standing background in systems administration, mainly in the Microsoft ecosystem, and am proficient in PowerShell. When I first dipped my toes into roles that involved working with Microsoft Azure, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my automation skills transferred over quite easily. However, I faced a new challenge - how to run my PowerShell scripts and code in the cloud and determine the benefits of each solution. Historically my PowerShell scripts and modules ran on Windows Server as scheduled tasks, connecting to other systems and platforms to perform various tasks.
In this talk, I'll take you on a journey to discover the many ways you can harness the power of PowerShell in Microsoft Azure. From executing quick one-liners to creating functions that respond to events, running as scheduled tasks, being triggered with a webhook, or even using PowerShell as "the glue" in IaC deployments with ARM or Bicep templates.
Calling all IT Pros, Cloud Engineers, and DevOps Engineers, this one's for you. I'll show you how to leverage your existing PowerShell knowledge to configure and run automation in Microsoft Azure and help you make informed decisions about where to run your code. Are you ready to level up your automation game?
Ephemeral Environments: Easier Said Than Spun
Ephemeral environments sound like the perfect solution for quickly testing changes. Spin up fresh infrastructure for every feature branch, test in isolation, tear it down when you're done. Clean, efficient, disposable. Simple, right?
Well, there's a bit more to it than that.
In this talk, I'll explore why many teams love the idea of ephemeral environments but struggle to implement them. We'll cover the fundamentals you need to understand before diving in, from how long these environments should live, to whether they need to mirror production, to where your data comes from, and what you should use these environments for.
You'll walk away understanding:
- What ephemeral environments are, when they make sense, and what infrastructure maturity you need before attempting this
- How your existing infrastructure choices (Kubernetes, Azure Static Web Apps, virtual machines, PaaS, etc.) influence your implementation approach
- Real-world tradeoffs between the coordination overhead of static environments versus the cost and complexity of ephemeral ones
- Why parameters and variables will be required everywhere, and why they can be frustrating
This is an honest look at what works, what doesn't, and how to bridge the gap between wanting ephemeral environments and successfully running them. I'll show a couple of demos of getting started, so whether you're evaluating ephemeral environments for the first time or looking to understand why your initial experiments didn't stick, this talk will help you make informed decisions about your approach.
Execute Custom Steps Using PowerShell in your Azure IaC Deployments
Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tooling to deploy cloud infrastructure is a game-changer, but there are times when even the best tooling falls short. That's where PowerShell can help! It's like a superpower that helps you integrate external systems, execute complex deployment processes, and handle data plane level actions that IaC alone can't accomplish.
If you're working with Microsoft Azure, deployment scripts are your secret weapon for achieving things that can't be done with ARM or Bicep templates alone. And in this session, we're diving in! We'll get hands-on with Bicep, Azure, and PowerShell to explore some real-world use cases for PowerShell deployment scripts in Azure, integrated with Azure Bicep IaC templates.
My mission is simple: to help you take your IaC templates and infrastructure deployment pipelines to the next level. By leveraging PowerShell for tasks that are difficult or impossible to handle natively with IaC tooling, you'll make your deployment processes more efficient and your life easier!
Using Azure Load Testing to Test Application Performance and Scalability
Knowing that your application is well-architected, scalable, and that introducing new features or components won't introduce bottlenecks is challenging. Not only do you need to understand the constraints of your application architecture on day 0, but you need to continually check that your infrastructure and automation will cope with an increase in load. Key business stakeholders will want to know much load your application can be under while remaining performant, and they'll look to you for answers to questions such as:
- How many users can our application support?
- Do you know what the current bottleneck of the application is?
- You've told me we've got this fancy "auto scale" turned on for our cloud components, but have we tested it works as expected?
- We're about to introduce a new feature to the application which required additional infrastructure. Are you confident this won't introduce bottlenecks to the performance or scalability of the application?
If you'd struggle to answer some of these questions with data to back up your statements, then this is the session for you!
Azure Load Testing is a (preview) managed service allowing you to easily generate high-scale load to test your applications. Your application doesn't need to be hosted in Azure, but if it is, you can gain additional insights into how the components of your applications are performing when the application is under load.
In this session, we'll start by understanding how the Azure Load Testing service works, and then move into some hands-on demos starting with a basic load test, understanding Jmeter, load testing private endpoints in Azure, and integrating the Azure infrastructure being load tested with Azure Monitor for end-to-end observability. Whether you're an architect, engineer, administrator, or developer, you'll leave the session with a fundamental understanding of what the Azure Load Testing service can provide for you, with the practical knowledge to start using the service to test your application performance and scalability.
Nobody Likes Wet DevOps - Keep Your CI/CD DRY With GitHub Reusable Workflows
I often work with customers who have several build and release pipelines that have been purpose-built for each application or service, and are typically sitting in the same repository as that application or service. Often these pipelines are extremely similar, and sometimes they are even the same as they have been copied and pasted between repositories. This can create a lot of overhead, duplication, and introduce inconsistency to your software development lifecycle.
A common principle of software development is "Don't Repeat Yourself", referred to as DRY, and in this wonderful world of all things 'DevOps', it's the responsibility of multiple parties to ensure DRY is used wherever possible, including pipelines. By bringing the DRY principle to CI/CD pipelines, you can lower the overhead, duplication, and management of pipelines to create centralised, abstracted, and reusable pipeline templates, which you can then call from multiple repositories.
Whether you're a Developer, Platform Engineer, Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Architect, or really anyone doing anything with CI/CD, you'll get value from this session by understanding the pain points of not incorporating DRY principles with pipelines, followed by the benefits of using pipeline templates for infrastructure or software deployments. While this talk will focus on GitHub Actions and their feature known as reusable workflows, the concepts and patterns apply to many different tools, so even if you aren't using GitHub for your CI/CD tooling today, you'll still be sure to get some value from the session.
Matt Allford
Technologist and Content Creator
Launceston, Australia
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