Ned In The Cloud

I’ve been building an AI PC for myself as part of the preparation for a series of courses on Pluralsight focusing on running Small Language Models.

This post has basically nothing to do with technology.

There is a stubborn myth in tech that good software work is mostly about tools, velocity, and individual brilliance.

Neditor’s note: When I wrote this a few months ago, I really wasn’t sure I was going to publish it.

I wanted to give OpenClaw its own mailbox in Microsoft 365 so it could read mail, send messages, and generally act like a useful automation agent without piggybacking on my personal account.

There is no shortage of AI content right now.

Your workloads are probably spread across multiple clouds.

I don’t think most practitioners spend a lot of time worrying about malware hidden inside an open source package.

Platform engineering can be a slippery term because it means different things depending on where you sit.

As I mentioned in my planning for 2026 post, I wanted to get the AI-900 and AI-102 certifications from Microsoft as part of a larger goal of learning more about AI Engineering and being able to deliver Microsoft Training in that area.

Recently I’ve become interested in AI Engineering as a discipline.

Plans.

Welcome to the annual review for Ned in the Cloud!

In my last post about ephemeral values and write-only arguments, I showed how you could use the updated AzureRM provider to leverage the new azurerm_key_vault_secret ephemeral resource with write-only arguments that have been added to other resources.

Ephemeral Values and Write Only Arguments Ephemeral resources were introduced in Terraform 1.10, but they were missing a key component.

Terraform 1.10 has introduced the concept of ephemeral values for outputs and input variables, and as a new object type.

I originally started writing this post as a detailed history of my relationship with HashiCorp, how it grew as a company, and its IPO in December 2021- which happened at the exact wrong time.

Exploring Internet Equity and Network Magic with Dr.

You know it’s funny.

The overall theme of 2024 was acceptance.

I’ve spent the last eight years working with Terraform on an almost constant basis.

A couple years ago I discovered the Azure Landing Zone module on the Terraform registry, and I was aghast.

As I write this, I’m on my way home from HashiConf 2024, hosted in the great city of Boston.

Major version 4.x of the AzureRM provider was just released!

Recently I’ve been learning Go and applying it to technologies that I work on everyday, like Terraform.

Wondering how to encrypt your state data using OpenTofu?

Are you thinking about migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu?

Have you ever wished there were custom functions in Terraform?

The release of Terraform 1.9 brings with it a welcome improvement regarding input variable validation.

I came across this Yahoo!

When you create a new organization in Azure DevOps, you’ll quickly discover you’re not able to run any pipeline jobs using Microsoft-hosted agents.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool.

[Last updated 2025-03-03 for Terraform 1.11] Terraform and OpenTofu are both IaC tools that share a common ancestry.

If I’m being honest, 2023 was a mixed bag.

The terraform taint command marks an existing resource in state data for replacement.

If you’re reading this, then I must have done something correct.

Are you preparing for the Terraform Certified Associate exam?

Are you working in the Kubernetes space and looking for a way to tie together your monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana?

Guess what?!

For 2022, I didn’t go into the new year with a solid plan for what I wanted to accomplish, and more importantly what I wasn’t going to do.

As 2022 winds to a close, it’s time to reflect back on the year.

As I mentioned in this episode of Chaos Lever, re:Invent 2022 happened.

Supercloud - It’s a thing now, so I guess we have to address it.

This post was sponsored by HashiCorp, see the bottom for more details Before we get into the announcements and the event, I want to pause for a moment and just acknowledge how amazing everyone was at the conference.

Well hot damn!

This post was sponsored by HashiCorp, see the bottom for more details As I prepare for HashiConf Global in a couple weeks, I thought I would share the things that I am most excited about.

When I was trying to work with a module in Terraform, I came across an interesting issue.

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of OIDC authentication for GitHub Actions using Azure AD.

A couple weeks ago I received a notification from Onalytica that I would be included in their latest Who’s Who in Cloud?

Terraform Cloud (TFC) is a pretty cool service with a bunch of excellent features.