Tips on moving your Visual Studio Online from Microsoft to Organisational Accounts

11th of June, 2015 / Simon Waight / 2 Comments

If like me you’ve been a keen user of Visual Studio Online since it first came into existence way back in 2012 you’ve probably gotten used to using it with Microsoft Accounts (you know, the ones everyone writes “formerly Live ID” after), and when, in 2014, Microsoft enabled the use of Work (or Organisational) Accounts you either thought “that’s nice” and immediately got back to writing code, or went ahead and migrated to Work Accounts.

If you are yet to cutover your Visual Studio Online (VSO) tenant to use Work Accounts, here are a few tips and gotchas to be aware of as part of your switch.… [Keep reading] “Tips on moving your Visual Studio Online from Microsoft to Organisational Accounts”

Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how

6th of May, 2015 / Has AlTaiar / No Comments

Here is the presentation of tonight’s talk. It was great to see so many passionate developers and business people at Melbourne Mobile. I have embedded the slides below and I hope you find it useful.

Talk Summary

This presentation is basically a summary of what I have learned and the experience I have had going through my recent project. In trying to secure the users data on the mobile device, I have come to learn quite few common flaws in the security implementation, I have learned more reasons why you need to protect the data on your mobile app, and have come to know and use few useful open source projects.… [Keep reading] “Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how”

Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with Azure App Services

26th of April, 2015 / Scott Scovell / 1 Comment

Back in November I wrote a post that demonstrated how we can integrate Salesforce and SharePoint Online using the MuleSoft platform and the MuleSoft .NET Connector. In this post I hope to achieve the same thing using the recently released into preview Azure App Services offering.

Azure App Services

Azure App Services rebrands a number of familiar service types (Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services) as well as adding a few new ones to the platform.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with Azure App Services”

Connection Options When Building An Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution

7th of April, 2015 / Simon Waight / 3 Comments

If your business is migrating workloads to Azure the chances are at some point you will probably want to create a form of private interconnect with Azure. There is more than one way to achieve this, so in this post I’ll take a look at what options you have and the most appropriate scenarios for each.

We’ll work through the connection types from simplest (and quickest to provision) to more complex (where you’ll need IP networking expertise and hardware).… [Keep reading] “Connection Options When Building An Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution”

Migrating Sitecore 7.0 to Azure IaaS Virtual Machines – Part 1

26th of March, 2015 / Ian Deng / 1 Comment

INTRODUCTION

Recently, I had the opportunity of working on a Sitecore migration project. I was tasked with moving a third-party hosted Sitecore 7.0 instance to Azure IaaS. The task sounds simple enough but if only life was that simple. A new requirement was to improve upon the existing infrastructure by making the new Sitecore environment highly available and the fun begins right there.

To give some context, the CURRENT Sitecore environment is not highly available and has the following server topology:

Single Sitecore Content Delivery (CD) Instance
Single Sitecore Content Management (CM) Instance
Single SQL Server 2008 Instance for Sitecore Content and Configurations
Single SQL Server 2008 Instance for Sitecore Analytics

The NEW Sitecore Azure environment is highly available and has the following server topology:

Load-balanced Sitecore CD Instances (2 servers)
Single Sitecore CM Instance (single server)
SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group (AAG) for Sitecore Content (2 servers)
SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group (AAG) for Sitecore Analytics (2 servers)

In this tutorial I will walk you through the processes required to provision a brand new Azure environment and migrate Sitecore.… [Keep reading] “Migrating Sitecore 7.0 to Azure IaaS Virtual Machines – Part 1”

Moving resources between Azure Resource Groups

24th of March, 2015 / Olaf Loogman / 16 Comments

The concept of resource groups has been around for a little while, and is adequately supported in the Azure preview portal. Resource groups are logical containers that allow you to group individual resources such as virtual machines, storage accounts, websites and databases so they can be managed together. They give a much clearer picture to what resources belong together, and can also give visibility into consumption/spending in a grouped matter.

However, when resources are created in the classic Azure portal (e.g.… [Keep reading] “Moving resources between Azure Resource Groups”

Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 2

17th of March, 2015 / Scott Scovell / 3 Comments

In this two part series, I am looking at how we can leverage Azure Automation and Azure Resource Manager to schedule the shutting down of tagged Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure.

In Part 1 we walked through tagging resources using the Azure Resource Manager PowerShell module
In Part 2 we will setup Azure Automation to schedule a runbook to execute nightly and shutdown tagged resources.

Azure Automation Runbook

At the time of writing, the tooling support around Azure Automation can be politely described as a hybrid one.… [Keep reading] “Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 2”

Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator

16th of March, 2015 / Lucian Franghiu / 5 Comments

Originally posted in Lucian’s blog over at lucian.blog.

Whether you’re wanting to deploy a new workload in Microsoft Azure, wanting to extend an existing workload via a hybrid scenario or like me wanting to use Azure outside of work to gain more knowledge and experience, the pay-as-you-go charge model can often times intimidate and even deter many from using a cloud service like Azure. From a lab or dev point of view, it is all well and good to dabble in Azure at the various tiers of engagement, but at the end of the day you could be left with a credit card bill allot larger than expected. Enter the Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator where you can accurately estimate your potential usage for any given service.

Azure’s G Series VMs – Prime Compute Only One Click Away!

11th of March, 2015 / Simon Waight / 3 Comments

I’m going to start this blog post by making one thing clear. My intent in writing this post is light-hearted – I had some spare time on my hands over a lunch break and I wondered what I could do with it. The result was this blog post :).

Ever since Microsoft announced their G Series Virtual Machines for Azure I’ve been looking for a good reason to fire one up and kick the tyres. Today while I was skimming through my Twitter feed I came across a tweet showing the time it took to calculate the trillionth prime number on a 16 vCPU Linux instance running on GCP.… [Keep reading] “Azure’s G Series VMs – Prime Compute Only One Click Away!”

Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 1

9th of March, 2015 / Scott Scovell / 4 Comments

Over the past six months, Microsoft have launched a number of features in Azure to enable you to better manage your resources hosted there.

In this two part series, I will show how we can leverage two of these new features – Azure Automation and Azure Resource Manager – to schedule the shutting down of tagged Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure.

In Part 1 we will walk through tagging resources using the Azure Resource Manager features and
In Part 2 we will setup Azure Automation to schedule a runbook to execute nightly and shutdown tagged VM resources.

… [Keep reading]