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

17th of March, 2015 / / 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 / / 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.

2015-03-16-APC-001

Read More

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

11th of March, 2015 / / 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 / / 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] “Hands Free VM Management with Azure Automation and Resource Manager – Part 1”

Azure SQL Database – Dynamic Data Masking Walkthrough

23rd of February, 2015 / / 1 Comment

siliconvalve

Microsoft recently announced the public preview of the Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) feature for Azure SQL Database that holds a lot of potential for on-the-fly data obfuscation that traditionally would have required either custom business logic or third party systems.

In this post I am going to take the opportunity to walk through how we can set this up for an existing database. For the purpose of this post I am going to utilise the AdventureWorks sample database for Azure SQL Database which you can download from Codeplex.… [Keep reading] “Azure SQL Database – Dynamic Data Masking Walkthrough”

Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments in Microsoft Azure

16th of February, 2015 / / No Comments

Agility in delivery of IT services is what cloud computing is all about. Week in, week out, projects on-board and wind-up, developers come and go. This places enormous stress on IT teams with limited resourcing and infrastructure capacity to provision developer and test environments. Leveraging public cloud for integration DEV/TEST environments is not without its challenges though. How do we develop our interfaces in the cloud yet retain connectivity to our on-premises line-of-business systems?

In this post I will demonstrate how we can use Microsoft Azure to run Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments using point-to-site VPNs for connectivity between on-premises DEV resources and our servers in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Mule ESB DEV/TEST environments in Microsoft Azure”

Sending SMS Through PowerShell with Telstra’s New API

12th of February, 2015 / / 5 Comments

The code detailed in this post won’t work anymore. If you’re looking for updated PowerShell to use with Telstra’s APIs, please check out this updated post. 

Recently, Telstra released their first public API, which in true telco fashion leverages an existing product in their stable; SMS. The service allows anyone with a Telstra t.dev account (get one here) to get an API key which will allow you to send up to 100 messages per day, 1000 per month to Australian mobiles.… [Keep reading] “Sending SMS Through PowerShell with Telstra’s New API”

Command and control with Arduino, Windows Phone and Azure Mobile Services

24th of January, 2015 / / 1 Comment

In most of our posts on the topic of IoT to date we’ve focussed on how to send data emitted from sensors and devices to centralised platforms where we can further process and analyse this data. In this post we’re going to have a look at how we can reverse this model and control our ‘things’ remotely by utilising cloud services. I’m going to demonstrate how to remotely control a light emitting diode (LED) strip with a Windows Phone using Microsoft Azure Mobile Services.… [Keep reading] “Command and control with Arduino, Windows Phone and Azure Mobile Services”