SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379

3rd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Redis Cache is an advanced key-value store that we should have all come across in one way or another by now. Azure, AWS and many other cloud providers have fully managed offerings for it, which is “THE” way we want to consume it.  As a little bit of insight, Redis itself was designed for use within a trusted private network and does not support encrypted connections. Public offerings like Azure use TLS reverse proxies to overcome this limitation and provide security around the service.… [Keep reading] “SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379”

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”

Enabling and Scripting Azure Virtual Machine Just-In-Time Access

24th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

Last week (19 July 2017) one of Microsoft’s Azure Security Center’s latest features went from Private Preview to Public Preview. The feature is Azure Just in time Virtual Machine Access.

What is Just in time Virtual Machine access ?

Essentially JIT VM Access is a wrapper for automating an Azure Network Security Group rule set for access to an Azure VM(s) for a temporal period on a set of network ports restricted to a source IP/Network.… [Keep reading] “Enabling and Scripting Azure Virtual Machine Just-In-Time Access”

Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Logic Apps

24th of July, 2017 / / 4 Comments

I’ve talked about testable Azure Functions in my previous post. In this post, I’m going to introduce building a testable Azure Logic Apps.

Sample codes used in this post can be found here.

User Story

  • As a DevOps engineer,
  • I want to search ARM templates using Azure Logic Apps
  • So that I can browse the search result.
… [Keep reading] “Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Logic Apps”

Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Functions

22nd of July, 2017 / / 3 Comments

In this post, I’m going to introduce several design patterns when we write Azure Functions codes in C#, by considering full testabilities.

Sample codes used in this post can be found here.

User Story

  • As a DevOps engineer,
  • I want to search ARM templates using Azure Functions
  • So that I can browse the search result.

Basic Function Code

We assume that we have a basic structure that Azure Functions can use.… [Keep reading] “Is Your Serverless Application Testable? – Azure Functions”

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”

Quickly deploying all the things from Excel with PowerShell

7th of July, 2017 / / 3 Comments

As an ex-Excel Developer, I tend to resolve any perceived inefficiencies when dealing with any tabular data by automating the snot out of it with Excel and VBA. As a SharePoint developer, there is no shortage of stuff that we need to provision into SharePoint to build business solutions, often repeatedly throughout the development cycle or between environments (Dev, Test, UAT, etc).
PowerShell was always going to be the automation tool of choice, and while PowerShell scripts are commonly fed with CSV files of flat tabular data, editing those has always been painful if you’ve got more than a handful of rows.… [Keep reading] “Quickly deploying all the things from Excel with PowerShell”