Bicep language

Late 2020 I got acquainted with the Bicep language when it was announced as “ready for production” with version 0.3. Immediately I started using it for a job at a customer and off the bat found the experience very pleasant. I was amazed at the ease and rate at which I could produce complex resource configurations.

Workshop

Over the past year I have given a few workshops for both colleagues at Microsoft and some of our customers to introduce bicep into their lives. For that I’ve created a workshop scenario you can find on my Github called A lap around bicep. Have a look if your looking for an introduction into the language and have prior experience building ARM templates.

Welcome

This is the first post so it obviously must contain the obligatory, sorry about that.

HelloWorld();

Getting started

So, I’ve finally followed getting started with Hugo and managed to get going. Not 100% easy, probably due to the fact that I’ve picked up a theme name Arabica that maybe was a out of date. Its quite nice ( after I’ve fixed it ).

What to expect here

Just a set of blog posts covering the things that I think are worthy of sharing. Topics you may find here:

Wardley Maps

Somewhere in 2016 I stumbled upon a conference video presented by a person named Simon Wardley ( @swardley ) hence the name Wardley mapping. He was telling the story of “crossing the river by feeling the stones” and it was fascinating to witness how this method of creating maps communicated so much understanding. That is even without fully understanding the capabilities you unlock with them.

Origins

The reason I bumped into the video is because I’ve been looking into the “OODA loop” famously formulated by John Boyd. In the world of DevOps this is also one of the ways we can iterate, learn and take deliberate action. Wardley mapping includes this concept but mixes it with a few other things, among which Sun Tzu “The art of War” in what I can only describe as great insight by Simon who fused this coherently together.

My lungs hurt so frkn! bad!

Over the past two years I’ve been struggling to regain strength in my lungs due to the long term effects of a possible COVID infection somewhere early 2020. I say possible, because back then you couldn’t get tested yet, so I don’t know for sure. Symptoms have been acute shortness of breath, increased allergy sensitivity, enduring inflammation of the bronchi and a strongly reduced VO2 Max. So for example, whenever I tried to pick up the pace during training it would hurt or I just couldn’t get the necessary amount of oxygen into my body. When the seasons changed to Winter-ish this got progressively worse. That sucked!

What led to this

Over the past year or so I’ve been working in an environment where an instance of API Management in an internal network configuration was about to run into scalability issue. This is with regards to the number of workloads connecting to it using VNET-peering. Peering is the preferred method to reduce latency between workloads in different networks in the same region, but has a maximum of 500 peering’s. This is one of the hard limits in Azure see networking limits.