Easy Debugging of PowerShell DSC for Azure Virtual Machines

11th of January, 2016 / / 6 Comments

Many of the Kloud team have recently been buried deep in the world of Azure Resource Manager (ARM) as it becomes the preferred way to create and manage Azure resources.

One extension point offered via ARM for Virtual Machine automation is the use of PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to control the Windows OS (and now Linux too!) and application software setup on a VM post creation.

I hadn’t touched PowerShell DSC much prior to the last year and have found that it’s not that hard to pick up, especially if you come from a programming, scripting or Linux sysadmin background.… [Keep reading] “Easy Debugging of PowerShell DSC for Azure Virtual Machines”

Implementing Application with Office 365 Graph API in App-only Mode

14th of December, 2015 / / 9 Comments

Microsoft has recently release Microsoft Graph to easily integrate Office 365 resources with applications. Graph API basically provides one single endpoint to call bunch of Web APIs to get access Office 365 resources.

In order to use Graph API from another application, the application must be registered in Azure Active Directory (AAD) first. When the application is registered, we can choose how the application is permitted to use resources – application permissions or delegate permissions. The latter one typically requires users to provide user credentials like username and password to get a proper access token.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Application with Office 365 Graph API in App-only Mode”

Resource Manager Cmdlets in Azure PowerShell 1.0

24th of November, 2015 / / 5 Comments

Azure recently launched the 1.0 version of PowerShell cmdlets. The changes are huge, including new Azure Resource Manager (ARM), which resulted in deprecating Azure-SwitchMode between ASM and ARM. In this post, we only have a brief look at how new PowerShell cmdlets for ARM have been introduced, especially for managing resource groups and templates.

Installation

In order to get the newest Azure PowerShell, using MS Web Platform Installer is the quickest and easiest way.

Note: At the moment of writing, the released date of Azure PowerShell is Nov.

… [Keep reading] “Resource Manager Cmdlets in Azure PowerShell 1.0”

Azure Security Fundamentals: Azure SQL Database

27th of October, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Microsoft Azure has many Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) features, with one of the oldest being Azure SQL Database (which has had many variations on that name in it’s time!)

Over the last few months Microsoft has released a raft of updates to Azure SQL Database that bolster its security chops. As a result I thought it would be good to cover off some basic best practices along with an overview of the new features and how they can help you improve your security stance when implemented.… [Keep reading] “Azure Security Fundamentals: Azure SQL Database”

Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS

7th of August, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Azure Application Insights (AI) is a great instrumentation tool that can help you learn about how your application is doing during run-time. It is currently in Preview mode, so bear that in mind when developing production ready apps. It gives you the ability to log lots of different kinds of information like tracing, page views, custom events, metrics and more.

Azure AI supports multiple platforms, but unfortunately they have not released a Xamarin package yet. There is one library which is for Xamarin.Forms… [Keep reading] “Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS”

Release Management Architecture in Visual Studio Online with vNext Environments

31st of July, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Release Management – The Background

Release Management Service in Visual Studio Online (referred as RM-VSO in the rest of this blog post) automates the process of deploying the builds into the target environments. It integrates nicely with the Team Build Service in VSO and both the services can work together to implement a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. The on-premises version of Release Management has been around for a couple of years, however the Visual Studio Online version has just been recently released, in November 2014, and somewhat different than the on-premises version.… [Keep reading] “Release Management Architecture in Visual Studio Online with vNext Environments”

Using Azure Machine Learning to predict Titanic survivors

12th of July, 2015 / / No Comments

So in the last blog I looked at one of the Business Intelligence tools available in the Microsoft stack by using the Power Query M language to query data from an Internet source and present in Excel. Microsoft are making a big push into the BI space at the moment, and for good reason. BI is a great cloud workload. So now let’s take a look at one of the heavy hitters at the other end of the BI scale spectrum, Azure Machine Learning.… [Keep reading] “Using Azure Machine Learning to predict Titanic survivors”

Azure MFA Server – International Deployment

1st of July, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Hi all – this blog will cover off some information to assist with multilingual/international deployment of Azure MFA server. There are some nuances of the product that make ongoing management of language preferences a little challenging. Also some MFA Methods are preferable to others in international scenarios due to carrier variances.

Language Preferences

Ideally when a user is on-boarded, their language preferences for the various MFA Methods should be configured to their native language. This can easily be achieved using MFA Server, however there are some things to know:

  1. Language settings are defined in in Synchronisation Items.
… [Keep reading] “Azure MFA Server – International Deployment”

Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode

23rd of June, 2015 / / 3 Comments

I’m going to start by saying that I totally missed that the setting of distribution mode on Azure’s Internal Load Balancer (ILB) service is possible. This is mostly because you don’t set the distribution mode at the ILB level – you set it at the Endpoint level (which in hindsight makes sense because that’s how you do it for the public load balancing too).

There is an excellent blog on the Azure site that covers distribution modes for public load balancing and the good news is that they also apply to internal load balancing as well.… [Keep reading] “Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode”