Azure multi-factor authentication (MFA) cheat sheet.

3rd of June, 2016 / / 23 Comments

Last year I had the pleasure of possibly being one of the first in Australia to tinker with Azure multi-factor authentication tied into Office 365 and Office when ADAL was in private preview. That was a great proof of concept project at the time.

I’m currently working on a solution for a client that’s selecting from one of the Azure MFA options: either Azure MFA Cloud, Azure MFA Server or enabling certificate or token MFA strictly on AD FS 3.0 (the latter is what I had used last year in that private preview proof of concept project at Staples Australia).

Today I want to share two tables that outline information that I brought together from various Azure documentation pages and Office 365 documentation pages to review for the client that I’m working on an Azure MFA solution at the moment. In working out what the imperatives / inputs / requirements for the solution, I found it easier to put everything into a table to visually see what options I could look to for this solution.

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Cursor-Scoped Event Aggregation Pattern – for high performance aggregation queries

1st of June, 2016 / / No Comments

Often, stateful applications executing enterprise scenarios are not just interested in the current state of the system, but also in the events which caused the transition that resulted in the particular state. This requirement has exponentially increased the popularity of the Event Sourcing Pattern.

Event Sourcing Patterns ensure that all changes/events that caused a transition in application state are stored as a sequence of events in an append-only store. These events can then be queried for tracking history or even be used to reconstruct system state in case of an unexpected application crash.… [Keep reading] “Cursor-Scoped Event Aggregation Pattern – for high performance aggregation queries”

Building .NET Core Application on Amazon Linux

31st of May, 2016 / / 1 Comment

In order to run .NET applications on Linux operating systems, Mono used to be the only option. Now, Microsoft has released .NET Core that can build and run .NET applications on any OS including Windows, OSX and Linux. In this post, we are going to install both .NET Core Framework RC1 and RC2, build and run a simple Hello World application, and compare RC1 to RC2.

Installing .NET Core RC1

By following the official document, Installing ASP.NET… [Keep reading] “Building .NET Core Application on Amazon Linux”

Installing Mono into Amazon Linux

30th of May, 2016 / / 8 Comments

There are a couple of ways to run C# applications on Linux operating systems. Before .NET Core, Mono used to be the only way for C# applications running on Linux machine. Each Linux distro has a different method to install Mono. In this post, we’ll walk through how to install Mono on Amazon Linux.

NOTE: Amazon Linux 2016.03.1 was used for this post.

According to the official document, we can follow the CentOS way.… [Keep reading] “Installing Mono into Amazon Linux”

Access Azure linked templates from a private repository

22nd of May, 2016 / / 1 Comment

I recently was tasked to propose a way to use linked templates, especially how to refer to templates stored in a private repository.  The Azure Resource Manager (ARM) engine accepts a URI to access and deploy linked templates, hence the URI must be accessible by ARM.  If you store your templates in a public repository, ARM can access them fine, but what if you use a private repository?  This post will show you how.

In this example, I use Bitbucket – a Git-based source control product by Atlassian.  … [Keep reading] “Access Azure linked templates from a private repository”

Inside Azure – Deployment workflow with Fabric Controller and Red Dog Front End

5th of May, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Abstracting complexities around developing, deploying and maintaining software applications have diminished the importance of understanding underlying architecture. While this may work well for today’s aggressive delivery cycles, at the same time, it impacts the ability of engineers to build an efficient, optimal solution which aligns with the internal architecture of the hosting platform. Architects and engineers should be cognizant of the architecture of the hosting environment to better design a system. The same holds good for Microsoft Azure as a hosting provider.… [Keep reading] “Inside Azure – Deployment workflow with Fabric Controller and Red Dog Front End”

Configuring Intune Service to Service Connector for Exchange Online with a Service Account

4th of May, 2016 / / 2 Comments

If you are considering the use of Intune Conditional Access with Exchange Online it is generally recommended that you configure the Intune Service to Service Connector.  While it is not mandatory, it does provide your Intune Administrators the ability to report on the effectiveness of the Conditional Access Policies on your mobile ActiveSync clients within your Exchange Online environment.  In addition, if you wanted to enforce the use of the Outlook iOS/Android app using Exchange ActiveSync policies, as per my previous blog post here, setting up the connector would allow you to configure the ActiveSync access rules straight from the Intune Admin Portal.… [Keep reading] “Configuring Intune Service to Service Connector for Exchange Online with a Service Account”

WORKAROUND / FIX: Login to Azure with certificate as Service Principal

3rd of May, 2016 / / 3 Comments

This blog post describes my recent experience with an Azure AD service principal authentication with a certificate. The process is well documented and seemed quite straightforward, however this was not my experience.

The issue

I was able to successfully follow the process to setup Azure AD service principal until the step where I granted the service principal with a role (using PS cmdlets). When I tried to login as the service principal, I encountered the issue below.… [Keep reading] “WORKAROUND / FIX: Login to Azure with certificate as Service Principal”

Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 2)

30th of April, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Continued from part 1

The 2nd part of the series will describe how we construct Azure Resource Manager linked templates.

Quick Recap

In the first part, we set up the first template which deploys the storage, virtual network, and subnets. This will be our “master” template where we will link all our related templates.

 

Linked templates.png

  • 1st template: master template – we will modify this template slightly to capture parameters and the linked templates
  • 2nd template: two web servers (IIS) – this is a new template
  • 3rd template: DB server (MySQL) – a new template

We will use the Azure quickstart templates on GitHub as the basis for the second and third templates.… [Keep reading] “Break down your templates with Linked Templates (Part 2)”