Running Containers on Azure

1st of August, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Running Containers in public cloud environments brings advantages beyond the realm of “fat” virtual machines: easy deployments through a registry of Images, better use of resources, orchestration are but a few examples.
Azure is embracing containers in a big way (Brendan Burns, one of the primary instigators of Kubernetes while at Google, joined Microsoft last year which might have contributed to it!)
Running Containers nowadays is almost always synonymous with running an orchestrator which allows for automatic deployments of multi-Container workloads.… [Keep reading] “Running Containers on Azure”

Setup a Power BI Gateway

21st of July, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Scenario

So, you have explored Power BI (free) and wanted to start some action in the cloud. Suddenly you realise that your data is stored in an on-premise SQL data source and you still wanted to get insights up in the cloud and share it with your senior business management.

Solution

Microsoft’s on-premises data gateway is a bridge that can securely transfer your data to Power BI service from your on-premises data source.

Assumptions

  • Power BI pro licenses have been procured already for the required no of users (this is a MUST)
  • Users are already part of Azure AD and can sign in to Power BI service as part of Office 365 offering

Pre-requisites

You can build and setup a machine to act as a gateway between your Azure cloud service and on-premises data sources.… [Keep reading] “Setup a Power BI Gateway”

Brisbane O365 Saturday

19th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

On the weekend I had a pleasure of presenting to the O365 Saturday Brisbane event. Link below
http://o365saturdayaustralia.com/
In my presentation I demonstrated a new feature within Azure AD that allows the automatic assigment of licences to any of your Azure subscriptions using Dynamic Groups. So what’s cool about this feature?
Well, if you have a well established organisational structure within your on-premise AD and you are synchronising any of the attributes that you need to identity this structure, then you can have your users automatically assigned licences based on their job type, department or even location.… [Keep reading] “Brisbane O365 Saturday”

Getting started with Azure Cloud Shell

16th of July, 2017 / / 2 Comments

A few weeks back I noticed that I now had the option for the Azure Cloud Shell in the Azure Portal.

What is Azure Cloud Shell?

Essentially rather than having the Azure CLI installed on your local workstation, you can now initiate it from the Portal and you have automatically assigned (initiated as part of the setup) 5Gbytes of storage associated with it. So you can now create, manage and delete Azure resources using a centrally hosted CLI session.… [Keep reading] “Getting started with Azure Cloud Shell”

Cloud Security Research: Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics

12th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

Newly published research from security firm Rapid7 is painting a worrying picture of hackers and malicious actors increasingly looking for new vectors against organizations with resources hosted in public cloud infrastructure environments.
Some highlights of Rapid7’s report:

  • The six cloud providers in our study make up nearly 15% of available IPv4 addresses on the internet.
  • 22% of Softlayer nodes expose database services (MySQL & SQL Server) directly to the internet.
  • Web services are prolific, with 53-80% of nodes in each provider exposing some type of web service.
… [Keep reading] “Cloud Security Research: Cross-Cloud Adversary Analytics”

Using ADFS on-premises MFA with Azure AD Conditional Access

1st of July, 2017 / / 9 Comments

With the recent announcement of General Availability of the Azure AD Conditional Access policies in the Azure Portal, it is a good time to reassess your current MFA policies particularly if you are utilising ADFS with on-premises MFA; either via a third party provider or with something like Azure MFA Server.
Prior to conditional MFA policies being possible, when utilising on-premises MFA with Office 365 and/or Azure AD the MFA rules were generally enabled on the ADFS relying party trust itself. … [Keep reading] “Using ADFS on-premises MFA with Azure AD Conditional Access”

Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory

27th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft’s integration stack has slowly matured over the past years, and we’re on the verge of finally breaking away from BizTalk Server, or are we? In this article I’m going to explore Azure Data Factory (ADF). Rather than showing the usual out of the box demo I’m going to demonstrate a real-world scenario that I recently encountered at one of Kloud’s customers.
ADF is a very easy to use and cost-effective solution for simple integration scenarios that can be best described as ETL in the ‘old world’.… [Keep reading] “Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory”

The quickest way to create new VMs in Azure from existing VM snapshots, mostly with PowerShell

9th of June, 2017 / / 11 Comments

There’s probably multiple ways to do this, both right and wrong, but, here’s a process that I’ve been using for a while that I’ve recently tweaked to take advantage of new Azure Managed Disks.

Sidebar – standard managed disk warning

Before I go on though, I wanted to issue a quick warning about the differences between standard unmanaged and managed disks. Microsoft will be pushing you to you Managed Disks more and more. Yes, its a great feature that makes the management of VM disks simpler.

… [Keep reading] “The quickest way to create new VMs in Azure from existing VM snapshots, mostly with PowerShell”

How to build and deploy an Azure NodeJS WebApp using Visual Studio Code

5th of June, 2017 / / No Comments 
Update April 2019  The presentation in this post 
updates the later section of this post whereby you 
can easily publish your app to Azure without needing 
to do all the manual FTP steps.

Introduction

This week I had the need to build a small web application with a reasonably simple front end that will later be integrated inside a Portal. The web application isn’t going to be high use and didn’t necessitate deployment of infrastructure (VM’s).… [Keep reading] “How to build and deploy an Azure NodeJS WebApp using Visual Studio Code”