IoT – Solar & Azure

18th of November, 2014 / / 6 Comments

Ever since we got our solar system installed about two years ago, I’ve been keeping track of the total power generated by the system. Every month I would write down the totals and add it to my Excel spreadsheet. Although it’s not much work, it’s still manual work… yes all 2 minutes every month.

So when the whole “Internet of Things” discussion started at our office (see Matt’s blog “Azure Mobile Services and the Internet of Things“) I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at doing this using Azure – even if it was only to prove the IoT concept.… [Keep reading] “IoT – Solar & Azure”

Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region

16th of November, 2014 / / 11 Comments

I have a number of DEV/TEST Virtual Machines (VMs) deployed to Azure Regions in Southeast Asia (Singapore) and West US as these were the closet to those of us living in Australia. Now that the new Azure Regions in Australia have been launched, it’s time to start migrating those VMs closer to home. Manually moving VMs between Regions is pretty straight forward and a number of articles already exist outlining the manual steps.

To migrate an Azure VM to another Region

  1. Shutdown the VM in the source Region
  2. Copy the underlying VHDs to storage accounts in the new Region
  3. Create OS and Data disks in the new Region
  4. Re-create the VM in the new Region.
… [Keep reading] “Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region”

Publish to a New Azure Website from behind a Proxy

13th of November, 2014 / / 5 Comments

One of the great things about Azure is the ease of which you can spin up a new cloud based website using Powershell. From there you can quickly publish any web-based solution from Visual Studio to the Azure hosted site.

To show how simple this is; After configuring PowerShell to use an Azure Subscription, I’ve created a new Azure hosted website in the new Melbourne (Australia Southeast) region:

That was extremely easy. What next?… [Keep reading] “Publish to a New Azure Website from behind a Proxy”

Kloud Sessions from TechEd Australia 2014

7th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Consultants from Kloud are always looking for ways to help public cloud adoption by contributing to community events and sharing our knowledge. The premier annual Microsoft technical event to do this at in Australia is TechEd.

As in previous years Kloud had speakers presenting at TechEd 2014 and you’ll find their session videos below. Click through to the Channel 9 site to gain access to the deck to go with the session.

Azure VM Security and Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM

Presenter: Andreas Wasita.… [Keep reading] “Kloud Sessions from TechEd Australia 2014”

Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs

6th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or Session Riding) is the invocation of unauthorised commands that are triggered by a trusted user. A malicious website could make use of the fact that a user is logged in to a vulnerable website to then ride that session and forge requests. CSRF is a very common type of attack and ASP.NET has had the AntiForgery library for a long time. What’s interesting is when you have a hybrid/public API that your website is using and it is also used by other clients like Powershell, Mobile, etc.… [Keep reading] “Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs”

The Little Gotchas of managing certificates in Azure

5th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Azure and I have been friends for quite some time now, and I love the power that Azure gives me. He enables me to spin up a whole enterprise-like infrastructure in seconds. However, when it comes to managing certificates, Azure disappoints me. In a recent project that I have worked on, I got frustrated with some of Azure gotchas when it comes to managing security keys. In this blog post, I will share my experience on these issues.… [Keep reading] “The Little Gotchas of managing certificates in Azure”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2

4th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the first post in this series we setup our scenario and looked at how we can build out an ultra highly available Azure SQL Database layer for our applications. In this second post we’ll go through setting up the MVC Web Application we want to deploy so that it can leverage the capabilities of the Azure platform.

MVC project changes

This is actually pretty straight forward – you can take the sample MVC project from Codeplex and apply these changes easily.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2”

Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package

28th of October, 2014 / / 7 Comments

If you’ve been working with Azure Web Roles and deployed them to an Azure subscription, you likely have noticed the substantial size of a simple web role deployment package. Even with the vanilla ASP.NET sample website the deployment package seems to be quite bloated. This is not such a problem if you have decent upload bandwidth, but in Australia bandwidth is scarce like water in the desert so let’s see if we can compress this deployment package a little bit.… [Keep reading] “Reducing the size of an Azure Web Role deployment package”

Direct Access on Azure, Why? Can? How?

28th of October, 2014 / / 10 Comments

Direct Access on Azure?

A customer recently requested Kloud to assist them in implementing a Windows 2012 R2 server based Direct Access (DA) service, as their work force had recently moved to a Windows 8 client platform.  What did surprise me was that they requested it be one of the first solutions to be hosted on their Microsoft Azure service.

Direct Access, for those unfamiliar with the technology, is essentially an ‘always on’ VPN style connection that provides a user access to a corporate network from any basic Internet network connection without any user interaction. … [Keep reading] “Direct Access on Azure, Why? Can? How?”

How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions

27th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Today’s a great day to be looking to move services to the public cloud in Australia with Microsoft announcing the availability of their local Microsoft Azure Australian Geography.

… [Keep reading] “How to find out if your Azure Subscription can use the Australian Regions”