Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1

6th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Over the Easter holidays, while watching my son play with his radio-controlled toy car, I had a strange thought pop into my head. Instead of using the sticks on the remote control, won’t it be cool to control the car by using just your voice? You could tell the car to move forward, backward, left or right. What if you could save all the moves you have asked the car to take so far and then at a later time, get the car to replay all those moves?… [Keep reading] “Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1”

Generating and Configuring Free SSL Certs for Azure Windows IaaS Virtual Machines

27th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Infrastructure-as-a-Service has provided the ability to quickly deploy hosts in Cloud environments such as Azure. However the certificate that comes with the host isn’t ready for Web Services. I hadn’t had to do this for quite some time and it came to my realisation again that whilst there are a few guides available they are for different scenarios than what I require. In my development environments I’m looking for an SSL Certificate that;

  • is free
  • can be verified through HTTP verification methods (not DNS as we obviously don’t own the *.
… [Keep reading] “Generating and Configuring Free SSL Certs for Azure Windows IaaS Virtual Machines”

A Look at AWS Organizations’ new SCP Controls

26th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Today I’m going to cover off a new feature that was recently announced for AWS Organizations around the use and function of Service Control Policies (SCPs). These new fine-grained controls enabled a wide range of capabilities that have previously been unavailable for customers using a multi-account setup. Previously, when setting up an SCP a user had the option of allowing and denying access to particular Actions within the AWS platform, for example denying access to delete IAM roles.… [Keep reading] “A Look at AWS Organizations’ new SCP Controls”

Outputting data from an Azure Function to Power BI with PowerShell

24th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Last week I wrote this post that detailed how to use the Azure Table Storage output binding in an Azure PowerShell Function. As part of the same solution I’m working on, I also need to get data/events into Power BI for reporting dashboards. An Azure Function (PowerShell) has the ability to obtain the data but the path to Power BI requires a number of steps that start with using the Azure Function Event Hub output binding.… [Keep reading] “Outputting data from an Azure Function to Power BI with PowerShell”

Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources

17th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

I was recently at a customer site, to perform an environment review of their AWS real-estate. As part of this engagement, I was going to do an inventory of all their AWS resources. Superficially, this sounds like an easy task, however when you consider the various regions that resources can be provisioned into, the amount of work required for a simple inventory can easily escalate.

Not being a big fan of manual work, I started to look at ways to automate this task.… [Keep reading] “Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources”

Beer Styles Added to Azure Table Service.PNG

Leveraging the Azure Functions Table Storage Output Binding with PowerShell

17th of April, 2019 / / 2 Comments

Recently I wrote this post on using PowerShell to bulk load data into Azure Table Service. Whilst this method works great it does rely on the AzureRM PowerShell module to provide the ability to batch ingest data into Azure Table Service.

I’m working on a solution that requires levels of automation to obtain data from events from Microsoft Graph and ingest that data into Azure Table Service. That doesn’t work with the AzureRM PowerShell Module.

Azure Functions provide additional Bindings for Input and Output, but I’d never had the need to spend the time working it out how to output to Azure Table Storage (with PowerShell).… [Keep reading] “Leveraging the Azure Functions Table Storage Output Binding with PowerShell”

Quality of life user experience improvements to SharePoint Online through the use of 301 redirects and Azure App Service

12th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter, @LucianFrango.

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This is the third time in the last year that I’ve had to setup a HTTP 301 redirect in Azure for a customer.Doing so improves the general quality of life experience for users accessing various Microsoft 365 services, like for example specific SharePoint Online team sites, or Exchange Online OWA.

With each implementation I turned to Azure App Service to deliver the functionality needed.… [Keep reading] “Quality of life user experience improvements to SharePoint Online through the use of 301 redirects and Azure App Service”

Using AutoRest for PowerShell to generate PowerShell Modules

12th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Recently the Beta of the AutoRest for PowerShell Generator has been made available. At the recent Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle Garrett Serack gave those that were interested a 1 hr corridor session on getting started with AutoRest for PowerShell.

AutoRest is a tool that generates client libraries for accessing RESTful web services. Microsoft are moving towards using AutoRest to generate SDK’s for the API’s in the standard languages they provide SDK’s for. In addition the AutoRest for PowerShell generator aims to automate the generation of PowerShell Modules for Azure API’s.… [Keep reading] “Using AutoRest for PowerShell to generate PowerShell Modules”

VSCode Virtual Environments using your Browser

10th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of virtual environments and PowerShell. Late last year I wrote this series on Nested Virtual PowerShell Desktop Environments on Windows 10 & Windows Server 2019 in Azure A lot of the back story for that three post series was to have virtual environments for PowerShell.

Moving forward six months and I’m at the beginning of the journey towards migrating from PowerShell Desktop to PowerShell Core. The quickest way to get started with PowerShell Core is to use the Windows 10 feature of Windows Subsystem for Linux.… [Keep reading] “VSCode Virtual Environments using your Browser”

A scenario-based tutorial for Azure Kubernetes Service – Part 2

9th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com.

Introduction

In this blog, we will dig a little deeper into Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). What better way to do this than by building an AKS cluster ourselves! Just a heads-up, I will be using terminology that was introduced in part 1 of this mini-blog series. If you haven’t read it, or need a refresher, you can access it at https://blog.kloud.com.au/2019/03/04/a-scenario-based-tutorial-for-azure-kubernetes-service-part-1/

Let’s start by describing the AKS cluster architecture.… [Keep reading] “A scenario-based tutorial for Azure Kubernetes Service – Part 2”